A Derbyshire man helped two terminally ill friends die at Dignitas

“I think before you actually die, your last sense is hearing, so I decided to talk to Bob about all the mountains we’ve climbed,” says Mick Murray.

The 77-year-old recalls the moment when his best friend Bob died in 2015 at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

Mr Murray, from Matlock, Derbyshire, kept vigil at his friend’s bedside, helping him organize the journey that would end his life.

Just over a year earlier, both men were present when Bob’s wife, Ann, made the same journey to take her own life in 2014.

British law currently prohibits people from asking for medical assistance to die.

Murray is a strong supporter of the Assisted Dying Act, which would allow some terminally ill people to have a medically assisted death.

On Friday, MPs will vote on the project for the first time.

“I helped them out of compassion, and I think that’s one of the things that’s a little bit missing in the current debate,” Murray said of his friends Bob and Ann.

The couple had been living in North Wales and had been married for a long time when 68-year-old Ann was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), which causes falls and a gradual loss of mobility.

“It’s a terrible disease and at the end of her life she wasn’t able to do anything for herself. She had to be fed, toileted and washed, but her mind was still working,” Murray said.

Ann traveled to Dignitas in February 2014 and died “peacefully with her husband and a group of friends who were traveling there,” Murray added.

A year later, Bob, who was an “active mountaineer and climber,” was diagnosed with an aggressive form of mesothelioma, a cancer that affects the lining of the lungs.

“Bob was taking enough morphine to kill a horse,” Murray said.

“He also decided to go to Dignitas, and we went there just a year and a little after his wife was there.”

Speaking about his friend’s death, Murray said: ‘Bob decided to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Ode to Joy.

“We wanted to celebrate his life as best we could. It would be even nicer if we were in England, in his house, at home.”

“Both Bob and Ann would have preferred to die at home, with a group of friends, probably drinking too much red wine.

“This path was not possible for them,” Murray said.

“I thought it was the most humane thing they could do, considering they were both ineligible for palliative care.”

Critics of the assisted dying bill fear it will mean elderly and vulnerable patients will be put under pressure to end their lives.

Opponents warn you could come under pressure to end your life and are calling on the government to focus on improving palliative care instead.

Paralympian and member of the House of Lords, Baroness Grey-Thompson, is a vocal critic.

She previously told the BBC she was concerned about “the impact on vulnerable and disabled people, (the risk of) coercive control and the ability of doctors to make a diagnosis within six months.”

Actress and disability rights activist Liz Carr, author of a documentary for BBC One Better to be dead? he is also against changing the law.

“Some of us have very real concerns based on our lived experience and what has happened in other countries where it is legal,” she wrote in X.

Dr Gordon Macdonald, director of the Care Not Killing campaign group, said: “This bill is being prepared in indecent haste and ignores deep-seated problems in the UK’s broken and patchy palliative care system.”

Dr. Bill Noble is a retired palliative medicine consultant.

He said: “I think it should be a completely legal process; it should be something like a civil matter, such as a divorce, adoption, power of attorney, or marriage.

“It’s something you choose in your life, which is a much broader issue than just medical, and I believe that if it’s going to happen, there has to be a rigorous process to ensure that people aren’t doing it for the wrong reason, the wrong reason is family coercion , it’s rare, but it happens, I’ve seen it.”

• If you have encountered the issues described in this article, help and support is available via BBC Action Line.