‘We need more compassion’: UK families call for assisted dying reform

As MPs report on the issue, a son and daughter on how their parents’ deaths led them to campaign for a change in law

According to his son, for the 10 years after Norman Ward was diagnosed with prostate cancer at the age of 60, “you wouldn’t have known he was unwell”. But eventually, the cancer “spread everywhere”. Then he had a stroke.

“It was all going wrong,” said Gareth Ward of his father. “He had been very independent. As long as he could go down the pub and walk his dog, he was happy. But he was in an awful lot of pain for a long time. He got thinner and weaker, and he had to take morphine all the time. He looked like he was already dead, and no one had told him.”