She photographed his body, his possessions and whatever he needed to construct a lasting visual collage of his life. The two emailed each other almost every day until the end, and some of these emails, documented in Chapter 16, form an important record of Craig’s final state of mind.
PATSY AND NEVILLE got hold of me through a friend of mine. They had seen something I had written for a woman’s magazine and they were looking for someone to work with Craig on a book.
They wouldn’t say much to me on the phone the night before. But I thought there might be a story in this.
So, the next day I went to Neville’s office at the shopping complex he is involved in. Patsy was there and she was crying. And for me that was a sign. There is a part of me that is so intrinsically interested in human drama, in the proper sense of the word, not the dramatic stuff.
And they told me they had a 28-year-old son who was suffering from a disease I had never heard of. I remember thinking as they were explaining: “What’s the story?”
And then they told me he had just applied to Dignitas in Switzerland to go and have an assisted suicide. And then there was just silence. I remember thinking: “This is an extraordinary story. He is still alive!”
They suggested I meet and talk to him. I told them I didn’t think that this story was a magazine article, that it was something bigger and that I would possibly hand it over to a friend of mine who is a writer.
But Patsy suggested that I make up my mind after I’d met him.
The next day I went to their house. I expected to walk in and find him lying in a bed in a dark room. But I found him standing there with his big arms stretched wide open and he hugged me.
He was so skinny because he had stopped eating solids by then and he said, “Thank you for writing my story.”
I told him I hadn’t decided yet.
He invited me in for some tea.
We sat down and the first thing I said to him was: “You don’t look depressed,” and he replied that that was why he wanted to write his story, because “I am not depressed. I am simply making a choice.”
I was immediately interested. I couldn’t believe, on some level, that I had been handed this story, and because of my curiosity I agreed to it.
I went home that night and told my husband, who said I must be insane and that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But I had made up my mind.
I decided the only way I could tackle this was to ask him the questions I wanted to ask. I had to be the audience, so to speak. We began meeting daily. I didn’t carry a voice recorder and I didn’t write while he was speaking because I felt that might get in the way of the flow.
So, what I would do was go home at night and write all the questions down and email them to him. He was better at articulating in writing than verbally, and I didn’t want my or his thoughts to be misconstrued.
I spent the next four months immersed in Craig.
For example, Craig would phone and after a while I’d ask, “How are you going to feel when you buy a one-way ticket to Zurich?” He equated it to being asked to choose between a holiday in Bosnia or Mauritius. “A no-brainer,” he’d chuckle.
Every now and again we would go to a hotel on the beachfront to talk. He seldom drank, but he did enjoy a vodka cocktail they made there called a Moscow Mule. The most amazing thing is that Craig would never cry. Ever. I think he was holding on so tight because he was frightened that if he did cry people would say he’s “emotional” about wanting to end his life.
So, that is what we would do. Some days we would have one hour. Some days we would not have any if he wasn’t feeling good. Some days it would be three hours. He would usually be calm when he met me, but sometimes he would be sad, sometimes silent and sometimes we’d just have an ordinary conversation.
Then I would get the phone calls, like: “Sandy, I have found another fibroma!”
I set up a whole studio for him at my house. And he would run up and he would let me photograph yet another fibroma. And I would say to him, “I can’t photograph 20 fibromas.”
Sometimes the conversation would become surreal. He would talk about how if Dignitas did not give him the “green light” he might gas himself. Then he would look up on the Internet and read up on the mortality rate, the statistics.
And I would drive home later to my two beautiful sons who are healthy and I would think: “What the hell were we talking about back there?”
There was a time in which I suffered quite a bit of guilt, because my kids were healthy and he was not.
Craig embraced my kids, as did Patsy and Neville. It developed into a very close relationship because Craig promised that he would give me the truth and he made me promise, at the very beginning, that I would not try to make him change his mind. So, that was our little pact and that was sustained right through.
But like George [Irvine], there were periods when I would be photographing when he wasn’t in pain, when he would be fantastic, when he would be talking to me and I would be thinking: “Why are you not going out into the world with this disease as an example of what you can be with it instead of disappearing with the disease?”
There was always this
