Az újságíró az édesanyja haláláról:

"The last stages of my mother’s liver and bowel cancer were dreadful: don’t imagine morphine is a gentle floating away – it detaches the mind, but not always the pain, while blocking the gut until an undignified death, obsessed by constipation. By the time her state was bad enough to long for death, it was far too late for her plea to go to Dignitas in Switzerland: those who take that grim and expensive path to a desolate death room need to go early, long before life becomes insufferable.

Some people might never have reached that point, but fear accelerates their departure. My mother, despite good palliative care, begged her GP to help her die. It might have been done once upon a time, he said, but since Harold Shipman’s multiple murders of elderly patients, every ampoule is counted, making it far too dangerous for a doctor to do anything of the kind. “Oh, where’s Dr Shipman when you want him!” she said to him, with what was left of her laugh. So she suffered on needlessly to the bitter end, and we suffered with her helplessly."

* A jó palliatív ellátás sem tudja teljes mértékben kezelni a fájdalmat.

* Ők is lekéstek arról, hogy a Dignitas segíteni tudjon nekik.

* Édesanyja teljesen feleslegesen szenvedett, ilyenkor kérdezné meg az ember a Hodásszal társalgó

   domonkos atyát: Miért is kellett neki szenvedni?