Healthy nurse, 75, chooses death over ‘going downhill’

Mrs Pharaoh, from north London, traveled to the Lifecircle clinic in Basel for her assisted suicide on July 21. Pharaoh cited her experience as a nurse, including working in nursing homes, had shown her the true reality of old age, something she described as “awful“. “Why on earth, if she was going to commit suicide, did she go to Switzerland and have all the publicity around it?”, Baroness Finlay of Llandaff told The Times.

A healthy retired British nurse who had worked with the elderly has ended her life in a Swiss clinic because she was afraid of getting old and being unable to kill herself. It is a drama.

Her partner, John Southall, told BBC London he had put a lot of questions to her over the years about her intention to get help to take her own life, but said he saw it as “her decision”.

“My daughter is a nurse and she said, ‘Intellectually, I know where you are coming from but emotionally I am finding it really hard, ‘ and I know she is”.

She didn’t want to become a burden to her children, or have a professional carer, whom she said are frequently “abused, poorly paid, poorly trained, with no prospects of developing a career”.

Ms Pharaoh spoke of the frustrations of having tinnitus and losing her hearing, the physical inhibitions brought on by a bout of shingles five years ago that stopped her enjoying gardening and walking, and the “hundred and one other minor irritations” she felt left her with a poor quality of life.

“If we had laws in this country where you could write an advance directive and say ‘If I have a stroke that disables me, I would like medical assistance to die, ‘ she wouldn’t have had the fear of the stroke”, he said.

‘I know that I have gone just over the hill now. I could also be sure that I will never be an old lady blocking beds in a hospital ward.

She said UK law on assisted dying forced her to keep her plans a secret from all but a few close friends and family. “A lot of people are very good until they are 70 and then they start sloping off a bit”.

She had “so many friends with partners who, plainly, are a liability”.

Shortly before her death, the couple enjoyed their final dinner on the banks of the Rhine.

Following her death, Mr Southall called Ms Pharaoh’s two children, Caron, a nurse who lives in America, and Mark, who lives in Australia, and then flew home. “Like all nurses, I have cared for the elderly as well as I could, but there were many occasions when I wondered why we were doing it”, she said earlier.

She said: ‘It is not his [John’s] choice at all and my kids are backing me, although it is not their choice. “If you knew Gill there would be no persuading her. She was not a girl to be persuaded”.

‘I have had to do this outside my home, and without telling too many people for the same reason.

“I feel my life is complete and I am ready to die“, she said.

She dined with her husband John on her last evening before she died, and arranged a humanist funeral, which will be held later this week.