Dame Jenni Murray remembered: her deeply personal call for dignity in death

Broadcaster Dame Jenni Murray, best known for hosting BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour for more than three decades, has died at the age of 75. A defining voice in British broadcasting, she spent 33 years on the programme, becoming its longest-serving presenter and conducting landmark interviews with figures including Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton and Margaret Atwood.

Following the news of her death, BBC director general Tim Davie paid tribute to Murray as "a broadcasting icon", while Radio 4 controller Mohit Bakaya described her as "warm, fearless and beloved by listeners".

Below, we revisit one of her most personal columns, first published in Radio Times magazine in February 2022, in which she reflects on death, dignity and the right to choose.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about death in recent weeks and particularly asking what might be the manner of my own passing.

My hope to have the right, when the time comes, to choose to die with dignity in my own home surrounded by the people who love me began some 16 years ago when I witnessed, within six months of each other, the death of my mother and then my father. For a whole year my mother suffered terrible pain and total incapacity in a care home as Parkinson’s disease made her life a misery. Each time I saw her she begged me to help her die. I could do nothing. Helping her would have meant breaking the law.

She died, just before Christmas, alone, having reached the point where she was unable to swallow. It was not the death she would have wanted. It was not the death I wanted for her.

My father used a week in the following May where I was unable to visit him to try to take his own life. It’s not unusual for people suffering unbearable pain to kill themselves in horrific ways that cause shock and misery for their loved ones. My father’s plan was to starve himself. After a neighbour found him and called me, I managed to persuade him to go to hospital where he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.

In the nearby hospice, he had two weeks of the very best of palliative care and died peacefully in my arms, having said goodbye to his beloved grandsons. It was, through good luck, the death we both wanted for him, but palliative care is not available to everyone who needs it.

My current focus on a subject too few of us want to contemplate has been prompted by the recent proposals in Baroness Meacher’s Private Members’ Bill on Assisted Dying. It has passed as far as its Second Reading and waits for a date for Committee stage to be set. Should the Bill pass through its various stages, it would become legal in England and Wales for a person with a terminal illness, judged to be six months away from death, to be helped, with the approval of two doctors and a judge, to die peacefully and painlessly.

I have been talking to a range of people on whether or not the law in this country should be changed. Some who vehemently oppose any change come to the question with deeply held religious faith and oppose the idea that anyone has the right to play God.

Others, including former Paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, fear greedy relatives might urge an elderly person who they think has become a burden to opt for an assisted death. She also, as a disabled person, fears that others with profound disabilities may be pressed to see their lives as not worth living. Then there’s the young woman who was told she had six months to live, but is alive nearly 12 years on.

Conversely, a leading psychiatrist who was once opposed, having witnessed a friend’s agonising final months, has now changed his opinion. A doctor in California, where the law is similar to the one proposed in the Meacher Bill, told me of her own experience of helping people to die and explained that in a number of cases she has prescribed the lethal drugs, but the patient has not taken them. The important thing, she says, is the availability of choice.

I want that choice. I want to know I shan’t have to die in the lonely way my mother did. It’s my life and I want to know that, if it becomes unbearable, I will be able to choose to end it. None of us wants to think about death, but we should. The law needs to change.

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