Tony Nicklinson: A Woolfian Argument

The big news story today is that of Tony Nicklinson's victory in getting his right-to-die case heard at the High Court.

For those of you who haven't yet read about Mr Nicklinson, he is a 58-year-old gentleman who suffers from Locked-in Syndrome, a condition whereby, due to a stroke, one is left physically paralysed but mentally intact. For the film lovers among you, it's a condition that was very poignantly portrayed in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, starring Mathieu Amalric.

I have read about Mr Nicklinson today for the first time and even heard him 'speak' on BBC Radio 5 - very powerful stuff. His plight once again raises the controversial debate over what constitutes murder and what is a merciful, dignified death in twenty-first century Britain.

As it happens, my partner is a rehabilitation nurse who cares for a remarkable man who also suffers from Locked-in Syndrome. He has been making excellent progress since she first met him, but there will always be a limit to how much he and other sufferers will ever improve.

Like Tony Nicklinson, the only person who truly knows his quality of life is him.

It all comes down to quality of life and self-determination. Taking the first one, I am a 'disabled' person who happens to enjoy a very high quality of life, but that might be because I've never known anything different. People say to me all the time what a shame it is that I was born without legs, but I always tell them to save their pity for someone paralysed in a wheelchair. There was a young rugby player about ten years ago, I recall, who was paralysed below the waist by a bad tackle. Shortly afterwards, he went to Dignitas in Switzerland to die... Now, I believe that he had much to live for, with full use of his upper body, but that's just me. I can't even begin to imagine the shock of being an athletic young man one minute and someone who is confined to a wheelchair the next, so I can't and won't judge him.

Sometimes being 'disabled' is difficult to live with. Across the huge spectrum of disability, from blindness, to Locked-in Syndrome, what's lost is far more than just a physical or mental function: the constant need for assistance means one loses absolute control over one's own life. Mr Nicklinson has lost this in the worst possible way. His condition means that he does not even have control over whether he lives or dies, a power which most people possess, but, thankfully, never have to use.

In this over-legalistic world we live in, severely disabled people are denied this fundamental human right. The UN values national self-determination, it seems, but what about individual? I know the counter argument: you can't have greedy relatives or malicious doctors going around legally murdering people, but those are the sensationalist cases.

For me, Tony Nicklinson's case is not a grey area. It's black and white. He is able to communicate his thoughts and feelings, to express that he has no quality of life and his wish to end it. Were he able to kill himself, he would; but he can't, and the law will almost certainly rule against him as it has ruled against every other person (to my knowledge) who has made the same attempt in Britain.

So where does Virginia Woolf come into all this? Almost a century ago, she wrote something which I feel is appropriate here: 'Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death' - Mrs Dalloway. I'm not suggesting that Woolf would have been in favour of assisted suicide per se, but she clearly believed, both in her writing and her life, that individuals should control their destinies rather than be relentlessly powered over by the legal and medical establishments. Woolf's novel teaches us that life is entirely subjective, that we and only we know what it's like to live inside our own bodies. What gives anyone else the right to control me? Who voted for that?

Tony Nicklinson's fight is for all of us. We're all a blood clot away from ending up like him.