‘My mother’s death gave me an urgent mission’: Rachael Stirling on sharing Diana Rigg’s views on assisted dying

IIt was during the process of my mother (actor Diana Rigg) dying from terminal lung cancer that her frustrations about not having agency became apparent. My husband, Guy (Garvey), had recorded tapes of his father speaking before he died, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world to hang out with Mom. She and Guy talked about life, love and her career. Then there were recordings about the right to die. At this stage she was in hospital, when the end had been reached. At that moment she was an angry woman.

When the grief over her death subsided enough that I could listen to the recordings, I realized I had an urgent mission. I owed her this. To share her statements about assisted dying. Mom had seen friends go slowly and had nursed my father’s mother and always said, ‘Will you pull the plug when things get too bad? Put the pillow over my face? When push came to shove, I had to tell her, “I’ll do everything in my power, but I have a three-year-old son. I can’t go to the clink because I’m choking my mother. I will do anything and everything. But not that.” Dignitas would have been an option but wasn’t possible because it was Covid and a bureaucratic nightmare.

She was so proudly the author of her life. The fact that I ultimately had no freedom of choice came as a shock. “What the hell do you mean by the fact that I have no control over the end of my life? I’ve made every decision for 82 years. Why not this one?”

I loved that person. I didn’t care what she did or what she looked like, but she hated it. Mom could bear the pain of 10 people. More pain than most could handle. But there were some elements of the dying company that were unacceptable to her. The greatest was the human humiliation of losing control of her bowels. That went further than it turned out. She didn’t want to live with that.

Now that I’ve seen a human in extremis, I feel like I’ve inherited a superpower. I’ve seen what death looks like. Of course, I would like to have control over my own death when the time comes, but what has become very clear is that mortality is not part of our lives. There is a national ignorance and we are terrified of anything that looks like it is dying or not looking to ever be young like a Kardashian. If someone is ill, we place him or her in a palliative care unit. When someone is old, we place him in a hospice. In order to have a conversation about assisted dying without scaring people away, we must first accept that death should be part of life, and not something we hide in the next room.

I was Mom’s caregiver. She came to my house to die. Despite the love I have for her, if I had the choice, I wouldn’t have had these last few months.

As told to Harriet Gibson