So, he would come week after week after week. He began to care for me as much as I cared for him. He would say things like, “You are looking tired this morning, George. Have you been working too hard?”
And it became a mutuality.
After a month or so, we would talk about his relationships at home. He felt totally understood by his mother but he felt that his dad didn’t quite understand him. That his dad was very perplexed and worried by it all.
Neville, Craig and I walked very closely together towards the end. Very closely!
Sometimes Craig thought that Neville was angry with his mother who did not want to go out with him any more because she wanted to be with Craig. All of it understandable, of course. He would write letters to his dad. But eventually his relationship with his dad shifted to one of deep trust.
What was really difficult for Craig was that after he approached Dignitas and had paid his money to join as a member, he didn’t hear from them for a long time. He was very angry about this.
For Craig it was all about the future and how he would end up. It’s a bit like a person who has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when they think: “I don’t want to go down that road.”
The difference here was Craig was 28. He could see what his life would become if he allowed the illness to go on. Before he came to me he was playing golf, walking the dog. He tried really hard to make something of his life, to find happiness. I can’t emphasise this enough.
And as he contemplated his end, without taking his own life, all he could see was more scalpels, more intrusions and maybe the removal of more organs.
He said, “What if they want to take out my remaining kidney, what if something happens to my liver? Do I want to be on dialysis for the rest of my life?”
What happened to him as a child, I think, lived with him and he could look up the road, and these things were beginning to grow again and he could see, more than anyone else could, what would happen to his body if all these intrusions were allowed.
He felt he couldn’t cope with that.
Craig made a pact with God that he would finish it in a dignified way and that God would receive him, without his body that was going to be left behind, and that God would welcome him.
It was more than unusual.
I remember speaking to a doctor friend, telling him about a young man who wanted to take his own life, asking what I should do.
And she said, “Put him into Hunterscraig,” which is the local psychiatric hospital.
And that helped me to focus.
Could I do that to Craig?
No way.
What we were all doing was trying to help a person who was sure of his decision to take his own life.
Craig felt very much to me like an older person. He couldn’t form relationships with someone his own age. He was mentally and emotionally and spiritually beyond someone in his age group.
It made it very difficult for him, in his life, to find someone his own age. For Craig, sharing was important, talking about what he felt; unlike most men who keep it close to their chests, he was happy to sit and talk to someone who listened.
I have worked in pastoral counselling with a number of depressed people and I have personally sent them to psychiatrists for medication. Never once did I think Craig was depressed.
I have been counselling people with depression for 40 years and I know what it is like to live with depression. It would have been normal for me to have spotted it if he had been depressed and say to him: “You know, you should revisit your medication just to help you over the hump.”
For many depressed people, once they get over the hump, they can see things differently. Depression need not be a fatal illness. I often tell people that I will go with them to a psychologist or psychiatrist if they want me to.
But I never once said to Craig, “I think you need medication for depression.”
He was totally focused on what he felt he needed to do.
I didn’t take notes as we talked and we ambled up and down a number of metaphorical streets. He told me about his family life, his worry about his father. We also talked about his need to help himself to die and turn his back on everything else.
And I said, “You realise what you are doing, Craig? You are going to bring to an end your earthly friendships. You are going to bring to an end the earthly love that people have for you.”
And he would say, “I will tell them why I am going to do it and they will understand.”
He said that if things went on the way they were going health wise, he would be physically there but he would really be gone. He said people would be coming to visit someone who wasn’t there any more and that God did not want that for him or for them and that he needed to take his life “so that I can go while I still have my senses”.
So, we kept on like that. He would be here for half an hour, an hour and then he would come back the following week.
Sometimes we just talked about life. About some of the experiences I have had, some of the experiences he had. We shared, strangely, with no sense of an age gap.
He called me George and he was very grateful that I was his friend.
At some point there were religious ministers who got to hear about our conversations and I was criticised for not getting Craig off his line
