Josie Kemp shared her mum Pippa’s story as MPs consider whether to support a Bill that could legalise assisted dying for terminally ill people.
Pippa (left) died just 18 days after being diagnosed with a brain tumour (Image: Josie Kemp)
Pippa Stone spent her final hours “crying and telling us she just wanted to die”, her daughter Josie Kemp remembers.
The fit and healthy English teacher was diagnosed with a brain tumour after suffering a seizure out of the blue in 2020. She died just 18 days later, aged 60.
As the cancer ravaged her body, Pippa was left paralysed down one side and in severe pain that doctors could not ease.
Josie, 30, said: “She died in nappies, she had seizures. She got to a point where she was so far from what she had originally been like.
“She wanted me and Dad to be sheltered from the pain she was going through but in the end, she was crying and telling us that she just wanted to die.
Josie and dad Andy cared for Pippa in her final weeks (Image: Josie Kemp)
“She was on the most pain medication she could be on without the doctors risking killing her. There wasn’t really an alternative, other than going to Dignitas and it was in the middle of Covid so there was nothing we could do.”
Pippa split her last weeks between the hospital and her Exeter home, where her husband Andy and Josie slept in the living room to care for her.
Josie is confident her mum would have opted for assisted dying if it were legal in the UK.
Pippa is remembered as a “fiercely clever” woman, “who could watch University Challenge and get every answer right”.
She was also a “real campaigner for fairness” – a trait that Josie now channels into her work with the campaign group Dignity in Dying as leader of the Hackney and Islington branch.
Josie’s MP, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, has previously declared his opposition to assisted dying over concerns that poor social and palliative care may mean people feel forced to end their lives.
She sent him an email sharing her experience but said she received what appeared to be a stock response which did not comment on her mum’s case.
Josie said: “I understood some of his worries but I think he should be more open to a conversation and meeting me. It’s horrible seeing someone that you love in torment and just waiting to die.
“It leaves such traumatic scars on people’s brains, seeing someone they love in pain like that and not being able to do anything about it.
“It would be so much more fair if people were given the choice, so it’s there for the people that might feel comforted by it when they’re in a situation that is terminal and scary.”