Reporting Dad's Death

At the inquest for Dad's death, there were two journalists present. I didn't mention them in the post, here, as they didn't play a significant part in the inquest. I exchanged a few words with them; enough to find out which papers they represented and that they often spend days sitting in court inquests like this. They gave me the impression that they would file a report of a few sentences that might appear in a far flung column of their papers. 

Not so. 

The Herfordshire Mercury reported Dad's death in the 5th Dec 2008 edition, in a prominent place on page 3. Go here for the edition and hit 'next' to turn one page to see it (oh, and click on the back arrow twice to get back to this post!).  I wasn't too impressed with their reporting, nor was Anna. They got Dad's age wrong, they wrote 60. The headline; 'Widower unable to cope with onset of Parkinson's' offended us. Admittedly we are a little sensitive to this type of headline which is not exactly untrue, but our belief, given the notes he left, was that it was more a deliberate act of someone who knew what was going to happen to them taking a decision about how to end their life before being unable to do so. I rang the Mercury and suggested that their reporting was factually inaccurate, that as he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's in 1999 the use of the word 'onset' was probably incorrect, and three, it conveyed what we believed to be an incorrect perspective on the death.  I spoke with the reporter, who after initially seeming to be a little defensive listened to my idea that if my father's death is to be reported, I would far rather be used as a springboard for a useful discussion about assisted suicide, euthanasia, etc. than it being portrayed as another sad old man killing himself in his garage. 

They printed an apology about Dad's age and the reporter did go off and write an article as I suggested. Given the number of programmes recently on the subject, most notably Julie Walters starting in the drama 'A Short Stay in Switzerland' about a Doctor going to take her own life in a clinic in Switzerland, it is a subject that has been given a fair bit of oxygen recently. The article appears in this edition, on page 16 and even gets teed up on the front page. 

So good for the Hertfordshire Mercury. I hope they do manage to start a debate on the subject. I understand that society has to be very careful about legislating in this area, but for those people who do want to end their life due to a terminal illness it feels right to me that they should have more provision that what is currently available to them.