11. The Manner of Our Deaths

After Geoffrey’s distressing death in 1995, which is described in some detail, Mary advocated for the legalisation of euthanasia for elderly people who feel they are a burden to others. This was a highly unpopular cause even among campaigners for professional healthcare assistance to the terminally ill. She wrote (jointly) Easeful Death (2008). Her daughter, Fanny, always a troubled soul, died in 2000 to her great distress. In a book, Dishonest to God (2010), she expressed her hostility to the bishops in the House of Lords intervening in policy debates. In the book, she was dismissive of claims that morality depended on religious belief, describing herself as an ‘atheist Anglican’. Until her retirement in 2015, interviews with fellow peers suggest she was a rather unsociable but hard-working and greatly respected member of the House of Lords. She moved home from Wiltshire to London in 2010, eventually settling in a flat owned by her youngest daughter, Maria. Extremely active and independent to the end, she refused to go into a care home. She had a rapid demise in March 2019. In January 2019, only two months before she died, she was interviewed for a series appropriately called Confessions, by an ex-Anglican priest, Giles Fraser. Accepting the label of atheist Anglican, she dismissed the need for a God, instead seeing Christianity as placing paramount importance, as she did herself, on love for other people.