Real memorial obituaries – Combe Down, Monkton Combe, Midford

In memoriam et celebrationem

In memorial and celebration

Anne Turner's final trip to continental Europe was one she resented having to make. She loved traveling to Europe, often for the opera. But having decided to kill herself, she felt frustrated at the need to leave the comfort of her cosy bungalow in Bath. However, with typical self-assurance, Dr. Turner made precise plans. She would die in Switzerland on 24 January 2006, the day before her 67th birthday.

Events early in the childhood of the woman dubbed “Boadicea” by a friend can probably be credited for the independence and strength of character that she exhibited throughout her life. Just 18 months after her birth in Harrogate in 1939, she was evacuated, with her sister, from war-torn Europe to Vancouver in Canada.

She only just made it. A German U-boat sank the vessel behind the one in which she was traveling, and such evacuations promptly ceased. But having safely reached North America, she enjoyed living with cousins and a grandmother.

In 1945, however, she returned to Westerham, Kent, in England and to parents she didn't know—and to the austere, post-war landscape. She would later joke that it felt as if she had been evacuated to the United Kingdom rather than returned home. After her carefree existence in Canada, the grey skies, food rations, and lack of central heating did not endear her to her native land.

Her father, a civil servant, and her mother, a local councillor, were strict and somewhat distant parents. So being packed off to boarding school in 1952 seemed more like a release than a frightening trip into the unknown.

Shortly after leaving school, a life-threatening adder bite provided a first glimpse of her mortality. Her response was not fear but curiosity. And from this near-death experience, she decided that dying was as easy as going to sleep.

In 1958, she went to St. Thomas' to study medicine. On the first day, she met her future husband, Jack Turner. After qualifying, they worked in the south of England before settling in Bath, where they found jobs in general practice and began a family.

Anne Turner soon developed an interest in family planning and played a key role in the provision of family planning services and health screening for women in Bath for nearly 30 years. From 1991, she was a regional adviser in family planning training for the whole of the old Wessex health region. She helped found the Bath and Wiltshire Doctors Group, which provides postgraduate training in contraception and sexual health to practitioners locally.

She had little time for views at either extreme of the pro-life versus pro-choice debate. An atheist and pragmatist, she was frank about the trauma involved in abortion but also believed that all women, including the socially disadvantaged, had the right to organize their lives and families in the way that suited their individual circumstances.

She had already been a supporter of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society for around 10 years when, in 1997, it was discovered that her husband, Jack, had multiple system atrophy. That year, at the age of 58, she gave up work to care for him.

In the words of her son, Edward, Jack became a “breathing corpse.” He died in September 2002. Anne Turner told her children that she never wanted to end up like her husband.

A series of falls in 2003 were the first symptoms of the degenerative condition that would strangle her will to live. The rare disease, called progressive supranuclear palsy, or PSP, would progressively affect her movement, speech, swallowing reflex, and blinking, as well as causing mood swings. People with PSP usually live for seven years. But she had other plans.

She told her children the diagnosis in November 2004 and, in the same breath, shocked them with the calm declaration that she would take her own life. Their attempts to talk their mother out of suicide were in vain. In October 2005, she tried but failed to take her own life with sleeping pills in her bungalow in Bath.

If Jack's situation three years earlier had been terrible, Anne's was worse. She had already seen her beloved husband die horribly. And unlike her husband, who was able to find pleasures and distractions in the smallest things, sounds, sights, and memories, Anne's more purposeful and resolute mindset allowed her to focus only on the immediate problem: her condition and how she might end it.

For Dr. Turner, whose interest in medical ethics had always stemmed from her belief in the rights of the individual, her choice to end her own life was perfectly consistent. She believed passionately that assisted suicide should become legal. She said: “I don't think death has ever held any fear for me. I haven't got faith; I'm a humanist. I've always felt that dying is like going to sleep.”

Anne Turner certainly gave the impression of not being a sentimental person. But speaking the week before her death, her self-regard asserted itself alongside her concern for her children as she told them: “I don't want to be remembered by you as being totally incapacitated, which I will be.”

So at 12:05 pm Greenwich Mean Time on 24 January, Dr. Turner drank the barbiturates given to her in an anonymous Zurich apartment and slipped into a coma, dying 25 minutes later. She was the 42nd Briton to die with the help of the group Dignitas.

She leaves three children.

Anne Turner, family planning specialist Bath (b 1939; q St. Thomas' Hospital, London, 1962), d 24 January 2006.