“Being
dead was no great fear of hers, but being compelled
to live was killing her,” writes author Marianne Brooker of her mother, Jane, nine years after she was diagnosed with a primary progressive form of multiple sclerosis.
With no remission or cure on the cards, only more deterioration, Brooker worried that her mother would do something drastic. “‘I try hard to live a good life,’ my mum printed on a T-shirt, ‘I’m equally determined to die a good death,’” Brooker reveals in her urgent, powerful book, Intervals, which explores how her mother lived up to that philosophy.
Lacking either the funds or the desire to travel to Switzerland, where assisted dying is an expensive possibility, Jane’s options were limited. “I often wondered whether she’d ask me for assistance, how I’d respond and what the consequences might be,” confesses Brooker, knowing that encouraging or assisting the suicide or attempted suicide of another person is illegal in England and Wales.