On balance the choice of an assisted death is probably not one I would make for myself. That may sound like a curious way for an advocate of assisted dying to start an article at such a moment. Contradictory even.

But at its heart this is a debate about choice. And whatever choice I might make, I know I cannot stand in the way of others. Least of all those closest to me.

That reflection is a part — one part — of my story. A story which I will come back to in a moment. But first, a little about the context in which I come to be telling it.

Kim Leadbeater’s Bill

As the Second Reading of Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in the UK Parliament approaches, the conversation about it has, unsurprisingly, become highly emotive. How could it not? The question at its heart is, quite literally, an existential one.

As Danny Finkelstein argued powerfully in a recent Times column, “relying on deep emotion and instinct is all we are really able to do. We probably can’t reason our way through this, even if we try.”

This is not to say that reasoning will not and should not play its part in our thinking. It must. But rather that however hard we try; we are bound ultimately to be swayed by deeply personal feelings. Ours and ours alone.

I have heard some commentators who are opposed to assisted dying, and to Leadbeater’s Bill, argue that lived experience is being given too much prominence in the discussion. Yet when all the technicalities are weighed up in the cold light of day, how else is any of us supposed to make sense of them?

I care deeply about protections and safeguards, but my support for the principle of enabling assisted dying is rooted in my own life story. It is a story in which death and dying — and suicide — have loomed large for four decades.

From lazy supporter to advocate

In truth I was for many years a lazy supporter of assisted dying. I had not given it much deep thought. But if I was asked, my gut instinct was to say that I backed the principle.

All that changed on 13 June 2011 as I sat side by side with my partner (now husband) in our Edinburgh home watching Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die, a one-off documentary about assisted death produced and directed for BBC Scotland by Charlie Russell.

In truth, I can’t even remember if we had planned to watch it. Whatever, that evening it is what we found ourselves doing.

Presented by Pratchett, the programme featured Peter Smedley, a 71-year-old motor neurone disease sufferer, dying by assisted death at the Swiss assisted dying organisation, Dignitas.

As we sat utterly absorbed by the story, I felt tears start to roll down my cheeks. I cry a lot. My husband hardly ever. As Smedley’s journey reached its end, I turned to him and said, I wouldn’t want you to do that. I would want to look after you.

Without even a hint of hesitation he answered me. I would, he said. I wouldn’t want you to look after me. We had been together for six years. I had not long turned 50. He was a year behind me.

One thing was immediately clear. This was not the beginning of a conversation. It was the end of one. Before it had even begun.

And there’s the thing. My gut instinct pulled me in more than one direction. When the question had been an abstract one — not about me or a loved one — my answer was to support the right of others to choose. However alien the possibility felt to me.

But at that moment, when it was up close and personal, my response was deeply embedded in my past. Ten years before I met my husband, I had sat at the bedside of my first partner as he breathed his last breath.

Living with a dying partner

My first partner died of AIDS related illnesses in 1995, having been diagnosed with the HIV virus (then HTLV3) eleven years earlier. We had met a year after his diagnosis and when he revealed he was HIV positive just a few weeks into the relationship, I chose to stay. Because I already loved him.

In that moment, sat on a bench on Victoria Embankment one midweek evening in October 1985 as the world scurried by, I made a kind of a promise. And by goodness that promise had its ups and downs — to both our costs — but it was one I fulfilled. I was with him at the end.

Lawrence died when he was 37. His ambition, for much of the ten years we spent together, was to reach 40. Despite the relentless toll the virus took on his physical health, and even in the absence of any prospect of life saving treatment, let alone a cure, there were times when I thought he might achieve that absurdly modest ambition. He was nothing if not bloody minded.

But I also remember, with horrible clarity, the moment when I knew the game was up. Coincidentally, given the terms of Leadbeater’s Bill, it came just shy of six months before he died.

The latest opportunistic infection to get a grip of his enfeebled body was Cryptosporidium, a hideous parasite infection which preys on people with weakened immune systems. As he crawled on his hands and knees from the toilet back to his hospital bed, the exchange between us rubbed out the future — our future — for the last time.

Within a couple of months HIV encephalitis had started to rob his intellect. In the days before the miracle pills arrived that’s what HIV did. Assault after assault. A couple more months and he came home to die. All I could do was keep my promise.

And so naturally I’d do it all again wouldn’t I? Except that something became shatteringly clear in that moment watching Pratchett take us on Smedley’s journey. This time, it wasn’t a promise I was being asked to make.

To be clear, this is not about packing my husband off to Dignitas at the first sign of terminal illness. But as far as he can possibly know, were he to receive such a diagnosis, and were the option available to him, it is a choice he would want to be able to make. And no amount of love and care on my part would get in its way. His choice. His alone.

And here’s the curious thing in all this. It is me, 13 years later who finds myself the vice-chair of the UK’s leading campaign organisation for assisted death, Dignity in Dying. Yet despite that, it is me who thinks I would be far less likely to make that choice in the same circumstances.

How do I know? Gut instinct again. But then, it hasn’t happened. Yet.

And here’s the other curious thing. I am a survivor of attempted suicide. Seven years after my late partner died, I made an attempt on my own life. There wasn’t a single track to that fateful moment. But grief — and the trauma it unleashed — was the principal vehicle.

Attempting suicide

When I attempted suicide, like many people who do so, successfully or not, I hadn’t decided I wanted to die. I hadn’t even decided I didn’t want to live. I just wanted a way out. And not to be here anymore — not to be alive — seemed like my best shot.

As I have written recently, I have experienced depressive episodes since that suicide attempt. But a legacy of that earlier rupture is that I know the beast better these days. I can see it coming.

And it is also that self-knowledge that has created something of a safety valve which mitigates suicidal ideation. Long may that continue. And yet it is also precisely because I have been there in the past that I know it’s not impossible it could recur.

Hence my visceral reaction to the use of the term assisted suicide, often used by opponents of the principle, and occasionally by journalists and commentators too.

Suicide ceased to be a criminal offence in 1961 with the passing of the Suicide Act. However, under Section 2 (1) of that Act, it remains a criminal offence (in England and Wales) for a person to assist or encourage the suicide of another. Leadbeater’s Bill will not change that — because it is not about assisted suicide.

Indeed, such is her strength of feeling about the distinction that Leadbeater herself has chosen not even to use the term assisted dying in the title of her Bill. Either way, the use of the term assisted suicide muddies the waters — at best unintentionally.

When I attempted to take my own life, I was very ill. My diagnosis was severe depression. But I wasn’t terminally ill. With the right treatment I stood every chance of recovery and once again leading my best life.

And despite the paucity of the treatment I received 22 years ago, I did recover and more recently I spent seven years as the chair of SAMH, Scotland’s leading mental health charity, championing the cause of suicide prevention.

Getting the language right

In Australia, where voluntary assisted dying is legal, suicide prevention leaders have spoken clearly about the importance of not using the terms interchangeably:

“Voluntary assisted dying is not a choice between life and death. It is an end-of-life choice available to eligible terminally ill people who are already dying.”

This message has been reinforced in the current debate by the veteran mental health campaigner, Marjorie Wallace, Chief Executive of SANE, who has urged MPs to think carefully about the distinction:

“To conflate shortening life with foreshortening death does a disservice to both suicide prevention and end-of-life care… and the language used matters greatly, regardless of how you may vote on the Bill.”

Wallace is right. Whatever happens to Leadbeater’s Bill, preventing suicide and enabling the best end of life care will continue to matter. Vital work on both will go on.

Enabling scrutiny

This piece is about my journey from supporter to advocate and the lived experience I had to weigh up along the way — as well as professional experience in the disability sector.

I have not discussed that experience here. Not because it has not weighed heavily but because I have focused on my own life experience. It is for others to do the same. They are. And, of course, their voices must be heard wherever they land on the principle.

Neither have I discussed the connection of all this to my tussles with faith. My relationship with faith has long been a complex one (whose hasn’t?) but at no point would it have stood in the way of my support for assisted dying.

And neither is this piece about the fine detail of the Bill. But it is not an attempt to argue that the detail does not matter. The Second Reading of Leadbeater’s Bill is not the end of the process but just the beginning. The painstaking scrutiny which must follow is critical.

That process is about changing the law in tightly defined circumstances. And those circumstances alone. This is not about a choice between life and death but enabling choice for people who are already dying. Nothing more.

There are those for whom the Bill does not go far enough. But like Leadbeater I believe it goes as far as it safely can. And in doing so, far from creating harm, it is about providing for a safe legal framework where none exists at present.

A vote in favour of the principle on Friday offers the opportunity for Parliamentarians to pore over the technicalities and get them right. Far from jettisoning scrutiny as some opponents have argued, a vote in favour of the principle enables it.

There will be those for whom the principle is a red line. They will vote against the Bill on Friday. For them, as for those who will vote in favour, both heads and hearts will inform their decision.

As a historic opportunity to begin the process of changing the law approaches rapidly, there are inevitably those who are arguing for measures which would kick the principle into the long grass. To Parliamentarians for whom such an argument might be tempting, I would simply say this.

Vote on the principle. Vote with your head and your heart. Vote for choice.