This article appeared in the Femail supplement of the Daily Mail on 18th February 2010 The moment I hear Elisabeth Shepherd’s voice on the phone I think she sounds like just the sort of person you would want looking after you if you were ill. Down-to-earth, energetic and warm she reminds me of my mum, a feeling of happy comfort that is enforced when I arrive in her Shropshire kitchen to find her immaculately made up, shooing a pair of yappy sausage dogs out of the way and talking ten to the dozen. ‘Be quiet, be quiet – do you mind dogs? Don’t worry, the dog-walker’s just come to get rid of them so we can talk in peace. I’ll just turn the stereo down. Do you want a cup of tea? Coffee? I’ll put the kettle on, then I’ll take you to meet my son, James.’ James, 36, is Elisabeth’s fifth child. She has been caring for him since he was injured in a car accident as a small boy and does not, she says, always feel quite as cheerily capable as she seems. It’s because of the hard times and the dark emotional wilderness the human soul has to find some way to cross – even when it is exhausted and ground down by long weeks, months and years of dealing with the almost intolerable – that I am here to talk to her. Elisabeth wrote to the Daily Mail after reading our columnist Allison Pearson’s piece on her support for Kay Gilderdale. Gilderdale is the mother who was recently acquitted of the attempted murder of her ME-plagued daughter Lynn, whom she helped commit suicide after Lynn made it clear that she wished to take her own life. ‘Your admiration for the mother of Lynn Gilderdale frightens me,’ Elisabeth wrote. ‘Across the hall from me is a young man who is listening to Radio 4. His name is James and he is my son. Quadriplegic since the age of eight, he has no controlled use of any limbs, nor even a finger tip. If his nose itches, he has to holler for help. ‘Like Lynn Gilderdale, he envies those who roll over in bed with ease. Sadly, we’ve had the “who will ever love me?” talk more than once, and when my dear daughter gave birth to her first child there were tears of sadness for James’s lost opportunities mixed in with those of joy at new life. ‘I got up to turn him three times last night, administered seven anti-convulsant pills and am on the second wash cycle, but the day’s started well with no fits overnight and we arrived at 7am with a dry bed. This makes us feel like great achievers, and generally we’re happy.’ Her account of the ups and downs of life with James was immensely moving. But there was something else, too: an impassioned desire to provide a balancing voice against those whom she felt may – following coverage of the Gilderdale case, Sir Terry Pratchett’s support for assisted suicide and author Martin Amis’s suggestion of suicide booths on every corner – be viewing this matter too lightly. During the lonely, relentless time as her son’s primary carer, she has, she said, ‘been at the place where I’ve considered helping James and myself to die. It’s this close involvement in his care that convinces me that we must maintain the protection of the courts for people like my son, even from me, his mother’. Now, standing in her cosy living room, she makes her case with energy. ‘My fear,’ she says, ‘is that if people begin to think of assisted suicide as an option then the balance will change. As a society, we will shift towards a different mindset. A mindset in which people like James begin to appear expendable. ‘It may mean ITUs (intensive therapy units) wouldn’t fight so hard to preserve lives, and that some people would lose the opportunity to live. ‘I also fear it may mean that people like James begin to feel that being such a burden on a carer, who is very often a close relative, is a choice they are actively making by not committing suicide. That guilt may be enough to tip the balance into them taking their life.’ James was an ordinary, healthy boy until November 29, 1981, when he went out with his father and older brother, Paul, to buy some sweets. He was standing at a crossing when a driver leaned across to the passenger seat of her car to add an item to her shopping list, mounted the pavement and hit James. The following months, when her son lay in a coma in the Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, were among the most harrowing of Elisabeth’s life. In the intensive care unit, he was put on a life-support machine, but after two weeks the doctors warned it must be switched off, to allow James the chance to come round. ‘I watched him come off it, and he looked directly into my eyes, I knew he was alert in some way,’ says Elisabeth, tears streaming down her face at the recollection. ‘And he started biting lumps off his tongue, so I knew he must be in pain and I ran away. I ran out of the hospital, to a church next door, and I went in there and I prayed for him to die. I just wanted James to go to sleep. Just so it would stop. So I do know. I do understand how people can feel.’ Doctors warned Elisabeth the chances of her son ever regaining enough consciousness to recognise her were virtually zero. ‘They kept trying to tell me how severely handicapped he was. They told me he would never speak again. ‘They advised me to put him into ward care where they thought he would last about a year. All I knew was, all of a sudden, I had really become a mother. I was a bit like a … Continue reading Mercy Killing? Never. I’ll fight like a lioness for my darling boy.. by Victoria Moore