Dame Cicely Saunders

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 10:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety four, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a doctor whose purpose in life is the care of the dying. The daughter of an estate agent, she went to Rodine in Oxford, trained as a nurse, and later as a doctor.

Presenter0:42

When she was twenty nine she fell in love with a young patient dying of cancer. He left her a legacy of five hundred pounds, with the message that he wanted to be a window in her home, a home she would open to help the dying.

Presenter0:55

She realized that the process of dying was a neglected area of medicine, and, starting with that bequest, raised enough money for a new kind of hospice. Two decades later, in 1967, she opened St Christopher's in Sydenham, South London. Today there are a hundred and ninety similar hospices throughout the country, all of them caring for the dying along the lines of her teaching. She is Dame Cicely Saunders.

Presenter1:21

What's the essence of that teaching, Dame Cicely? How do your hospices, as it were, differ from those that you worked in as a girl?

Dame Cicely Saunders1:29

I think the most important thing is to get across to people that this is an important part of their lives.

Dame Cicely Saunders1:35

that you can sum up what you've been.

Dame Cicely Saunders1:39

You can reconcile yourself with some of the situations that you may be unhappy with.

Dame Cicely Saunders1:45

In fact, there may be a lot to do.

Dame Cicely Saunders1:48

You needn't necessarily be sure that you're reaching the end of your life, but somewhere within yourself will be that knowledge. And I think hospice is about living until you die, and it may be much longer and hopefully very much better than you you ever expected. And of course, most of that time will probably be in your own home with people coming out to visit you, because hospice doesn't only mean bricks and mortar, it means attitudes and skills which are now spreading very widely. But it's also to do with the use of drugs, painkilling drugs.

Presenter2:19

Really isn't it?

Dame Cicely Saunders2:19

Well, yes. I mean, I

Dame Cicely Saunders2:22

wanted to do something about the control of pain, because quite obviously the pain, particularly at the end of a life when you were dying of cancer, was not very well addressed and had scarcely been researched at all.

Dame Cicely Saunders2:35

And the doctor I was working for said go and read medicine. It's the doctors who desert the dying, and there's so much more to be learnt about pain, and you'll only be frustrated if you don't do it properly, and they won't listen to you. And of course he was right.

Presenter2:49

Uh

Dame Cicely Saunders2:49

Uh

Presenter2:49

So you offer Obviously total understanding of pain control. You offer dignity, you offer support, a coming to terms with your life before your death is really how you turn it.

Dame Cicely Saunders2:59

Yes, I think what we learned very early on when I was working together with the sisters at St. Joseph's developing this.

Dame Cicely Saunders3:07

was that pain is not only physical, it is psychological, it's family pain and it's spiritual pain as well. And it's seeing a whole person with a whole need and a whole possibility.

Dame Cicely Saunders3:19

It must

Presenter3:20

Nevertheless, for you by the very nature of your work, your patients come and they go. You you go on and you've been there for a very long time, dealing constantly with death. It must has it not been a very gloomy business?

Presenter3:34

Yeah.

Dame Cicely Saunders3:34

Um

Presenter3:35

Yeah.

Dame Cicely Saunders3:35

Well, of course, I'm not by the bedside much now, but I did have a check from a patient in one of the wards just before Christmas.

Dame Cicely Saunders3:43

And so I went to her bed in one of our wards just to say thank you. And she was the most lovely person in her nineties, Salvation Army.

Dame Cicely Saunders3:53

Who is

Dame Cicely Saunders3:54

Full of life and expectancy. And meeting somebody like that at their most mature.

Dame Cicely Saunders4:01

and very ready for whatever was going to happen in the mystery ahead.

Dame Cicely Saunders4:06

That's not depressing. That is very

Dame Cicely Saunders4:09

enlightening and very rewarding.

Presenter4:13

Well, now, we we commit you here to a kind of living death, really, because we rob you of all company and and creature comforts, and we cast you away on a desert island. Do you find anything at all inviting about that idea?

Presenter4:25

Not with

Dame Cicely Saunders4:25

Very much. I'm not really a survivor on my own very well. I am a people person. But on the other hand, I have had times of solitude, particularly in the country. And perhaps you'll allow me a few birds to look at. Or to listen to, indeed. And music to listen to as well. What's your first record?

Dame Cicely Saunders4:43

Well, I'm choosing Chopin because we're going to be talking later about my Polish connections. And it also has been one of the records to which I have worked. I like to work with music when I'm writing and trying to think what to do for the next article.

Presenter5:53

Part of the first movement of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1, played by Christian Zimmermann with the Concert Gabau Orchestra of Amsterdam. Chopin, who was a Pole and Polish men, have played a very important part in your life, haven't they, Dame Cicely? Well, they have, but they've all been very different people. Shall we start with the first one? I uh who is the one I mentioned in the introduction, David Tashma.

Presenter6:15

Whom you know. Bust

Dame Cicely Saunders6:16

When he was Dying of cancer. Well, actually, I didn't know him when I was a nurse. I knew him when I was a social worker. You would have been, what, in your late twenties? Oh, yes, I was about twenty eight. Yes. But tell me about him. What what had he done for a living? Who was he?

Presenter6:25

Yes.

Presenter6:27

Yeah.

Dame Cicely Saunders6:29

He he'd come from the Warsaw ghetto, but he had left Poland some while before the war even, I think. He was just working as a waiter in London, and he was a very interesting person, very gentle. He was only forty.

Dame Cicely Saunders6:45

And he felt that he hadn't done anything with his life, and that he wouldn't have, as it were, left a ripple on the pool when he went.

Dame Cicely Saunders6:53

And we talked together of somewhere that could have been more helpful to him, perhaps, than the very busy surgical ward where he was, excellent though his ward sister was.

Speaker 16:53

Yeah.

Dame Cicely Saunders7:03

And the idea of somewhere came together as we were talking, and that was when he used that expression, I'll be a window in your home, and left us the commitment to openness, openness to people, openness to the world, and indeed openness to each other. But you'd you'd fallen in love with him, didn't you? I was very fond of him. In fact, yes, I did love David.

Dame Cicely Saunders7:24

And I remember one day when I was talking to him, he suddenly said, Can't you say something to comfort me?

Dame Cicely Saunders7:31

And I said the twenty third Psalm, which I knew by heart, and then he said go on and I said something else. And I said, Well, shall I read to you? and he said, No, I want only what's in your mind and in your heart. And that's another of the founding principles of hospice everything of the mind, everything we could bring of research and understanding, but with the friendship of the heart.

Dame Cicely Saunders7:52

Uh

Presenter7:52

But you saw him in some way, didn't you, as as a sign from God, if you like, as as uh of what you ought to do with your life.

Dame Cicely Saunders7:59

Do with your life.

Presenter8:00

Yeah.

Dame Cicely Saunders8:00

Three years or so before, having been searching for meaning for quite a long time.

Dame Cicely Saunders8:07

I'm one of those people where things suddenly click.

Dame Cicely Saunders8:10

And I felt as if I'd been turned round and and instead of battling my way against the wind, it was behind me.

Speaker 18:17

Yeah.

Dame Cicely Saunders8:17

And I really knew that I really believed.

Dame Cicely Saunders8:23

And I had a lot to learn, and I also wanted to find what was the right thing to do. And three years later, having just waited and got on with the work,

Speaker 48:24

Uh

Speaker 18:24

And I

Dame Cicely Saunders8:31

I knew. Mm. But you hadn't had any

Presenter8:34

deeply held religious beliefs as a child, had you?

Dame Cicely Saunders8:36

No, we weren't that kind of family, but I had a very good godmother who was very important to me all the way through, and she gave me all the right books, and stayed quietly in the background. But you'd been sent to Rodine to school and and and you'd been terribly miserable. I hated it.

Presenter8:43

Yeah.

Dame Cicely Saunders8:51

Bye.

Dame Cicely Saunders8:52

I was lonely, I was unpopular, I just didn't fit in.

Dame Cicely Saunders8:57

Um I did gradually by the end and ended up head of the house. But um I hated being away from home, and yet at home I wasn't very happy either. In fact, I was difficult. I'm not su suggesting it was anybody else's fault. I think it was my own. But did you feel pretty unloved?

Dame Cicely Saunders9:12

Oh yes. But then a lot of people

Presenter9:14

People do in their adolescence, don't they? But I suppose what all that means is you knew what it was like to be on your own, to be an outsider, to be aware of.

Dame Cicely Saunders9:21

Yes, and that was really important. It gave me a feeling for people who

Dame Cicely Saunders9:27

don't feel very well about their own self-worth.

Dame Cicely Saunders9:31

Let's have record number two.

Dame Cicely Saunders9:33

Well, I go back to the music that I heard at home, and we did have very good times as well as the bad times. And I'm choosing Paul Robeson's Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

Speaker 49:48

Hello, sweet chariot, come in for a carriage.

Speaker 49:59

Swing Lord, swing

Speaker 410:03

Carried Call in for the Carrie

Speaker 410:14

Ling low, sweet chariot.

Speaker 410:20

Go in for a carry meal.

Speaker 410:25

Swing more, sweet chariot.

Speaker 410:32

Come in for the catty.

Presenter10:35

Yeah.

Presenter10:39

Paul Robeson and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Did you always think, as a girl, Dame Cicely, that you'd like to be a nurse?

Dame Cicely Saunders10:45

Yeah.

Presenter10:47

Yeah.

Dame Cicely Saunders10:47

I don't remember it, but um when somebody was looking back on my old school reports for some reason, um they found that the headmistress felt that I had, and that my family didn't want me to, but I'd obviously repressed it, it disappeared.

Dame Cicely Saunders11:05

Yes, I did. I was thinking of being a secretary to a politician or something like that.

Presenter11:12

Where did you from? Nancy.

Dame Cicely Saunders11:13

Certainly, my father was very keen for me to go to university, which he hadn't been able to do himself.

Presenter11:20

And

Dame Cicely Saunders11:20

Yeah.

Presenter11:20

Then came the war, though, when you were up at Oxford, and then you really felt you should nurse, didn't you?

Dame Cicely Saunders11:24

Yes, I I decided after one term of wartime this was no place for a girl, and I then was able to persuade the family, so I waited to get into St Thomas's to train.

Dame Cicely Saunders11:35

rather than to go off and be a VA D.

Presenter11:38

Later, wasn't it, that you decided to be a doctor?

Dame Cicely Saunders11:41

Yes, because towards the end of my nursing training my back, which hadn't been very good,

Dame Cicely Saunders11:46

finally packed up and the obvious thing to do was to go back to Oxford, finish quickly a war degree and manage to get back into public health or something like that, because by that time I longed to get back into hospital because I loved it. The moment I started nursing, all the old unhappiness went away and I felt like a book that had been put into the right place on the shelf.

Presenter12:09

But then this very brave decision to train as a doctor, because you had no scientific qualifications whatsoever. I mean, it was a huge hurdle to decide to leap, wasn't it? Well, it was starting physics at the age of thirty three.

Speaker 412:22

Um

Presenter12:23

I bet. And you went on to study pain control. You worked at Saint Joseph's Hospice, where you were to meet the Second Pole to have a profound influence on your life. And I'll ask you about him in just a moment. But let's pause there for record number three.

Dame Cicely Saunders12:32

Bye, love.

Dame Cicely Saunders12:36

Well, we're going to go to the time when I was back at Oxford singing in the Bach choir, because I'd been singing in choirs all my life, and listening to Kathleen Ferrier, and I would like one of the arias of her singing, even though it's an old record, she sang as nobody else did.

Speaker 412:56

If the Saviour's outstretched hands, He would draw us to Him.

Speaker 413:10

He won't.

Speaker 413:21

In Jesus Christ I'm singing.

Speaker 413:33

See, see you.

Speaker 413:36

Which is all

Presenter13:51

Kathleen Ferrier singing the aria See the Saviour's Outstretched Hands from Bach's Saint Matthew Passion.

Presenter13:57

It was nineteen sixty at St. Joseph's Hospice that you met Antony McNavitch. Again he was a patient and he was dying, and you formed with him a relationship which you've described as the hardest, the most peaceful, the most inhibited, and the most liberating experience I've ever had. Can you explain that?

Presenter14:17

Well, he was in a

Dame Cicely Saunders14:18

Six bed bay

Dame Cicely Saunders14:21

And I was just his doctor for months.

Dame Cicely Saunders14:26

Suddenly he said something which made me realize that

Dame Cicely Saunders14:31

He um was very fond of me and I

Dame Cicely Saunders14:36

Remember him asking me was he going to die?

Dame Cicely Saunders14:40

And

Dame Cicely Saunders14:41

He's the f only person I think in all my life that I've without asking back another question or talking round it, I've just said yes.

Dame Cicely Saunders14:49

And he said long, and I said no, not long.

Dame Cicely Saunders14:53

And he said Was it hard for you to tell me that?

Dame Cicely Saunders14:57

And so I said, well, yes, it was.

Dame Cicely Saunders15:00

And he said, Thank you. It's hard to be told, but it's hard to tell too.

Dame Cicely Saunders15:06

And I think that shows the sort of person he was.

Dame Cicely Saunders15:09

And out of that encounter we had a month in which we were never alone, we were always in the ward, and yet we somehow managed to communicate.

Dame Cicely Saunders15:22

at an a really very, very deep level.

Presenter15:25

How did you do that? I mean, you must have been for a start concerned about the the the ethics of it. I mean the doctor falling in love with the patient. Yes, as long as you don't actually get into bed.

Dame Cicely Saunders15:33

Yeah.

Dame Cicely Saunders15:36

But you held hands. Yes, he kissed my hand.

Presenter15:36

Uh

Speaker 115:36

How's that?

Dame Cicely Saunders15:39

And we kissed once. But once was enough. And I think what was important is at the end of that month.

Dame Cicely Saunders15:47

There was nothing that we'd said that we regretted, and there was nothing that we might have said which we hadn't.

Dame Cicely Saunders15:54

It was very happy, and yet it was absolutely devastating when he'd gone. I was going to say, it must you must have been desolate when he'd gone. Well, I didn't have any memories. You see, we didn't have a past.

Presenter16:02

Uh

Dame Cicely Saunders16:05

So so often in bereavement you can go back and unpick and get the good things out of the memories and forgive the things where you got cross and we we regretted and when you were angry with them.

Dame Cicely Saunders16:17

Uh we didn't have any of that, so I had to

Dame Cicely Saunders16:21

To grow up in my bereavement, which I suppose was why it turned into such a very creative thing, because it was, in a sense.

Dame Cicely Saunders16:30

the power behind all the work that went into finding the money and building St Christopher's, finally building the home round David's window. Well, his death, Anthony's death, was the spur, was it?

Dame Cicely Saunders16:42

Well, no, I already knew that was what I was going to do, but I didn't know how. But are you suggesting that you got your creative energy, as it were, out of your bereavement? I think an awful lot of it. Yes, I do.

Dame Cicely Saunders16:53

And I think that does happen with people.

Dame Cicely Saunders16:55

I mean, I don't think I'm unusual in that. That you find something else to to to replace what you've lost, in a sense.

Dame Cicely Saunders17:02

Yeah, and you're saying thank you.

Dame Cicely Saunders17:05

And you're wanting other people to have

Dame Cicely Saunders17:08

in a sense, the the feeling of he was important, which I think both Anthony and David gained from our loving each other.

Dame Cicely Saunders17:19

Next record.

Dame Cicely Saunders17:22

This is something that I used to play over and over again when I was trying to come out of feeling very sad.

Dame Cicely Saunders17:31

And it's a Schubert song.

Dame Cicely Saunders17:33

Aufdemse, which has the most lovely accompaniment which one almost wants to dance to.

Speaker 417:49

He shall spy a vibe.

Speaker 118:05

Yeah.

Speaker 418:10

Well

Speaker 418:19

Erge for Gesching.

Presenter18:38

Schubert's Aufdem See, sung by Dietrich Fischer Discow. How much of a fight was it then to get St. Christopher's built?'Cause it was built seven years after Antony died, I think.

Dame Cicely Saunders18:48

We opened seven years after. It was a day-by-day business, and I was working at St Joseph's a lot of the time. And so, in a way, the patients of St. Joseph's were my fundraisers. And from time to time, I was able to take possible fund givers around St Joseph's, and the patients would charm him because I involved them all, and they they would be praying like beavers for me. So it was all built on donations.

Presenter19:16

Plus

Dame Cicely Saunders19:16

Yeah. Yes, yes. A lot from Grant Giving Trust, because I couldn't really do a sort of public appeal because I didn't think people would know what I was talking about, because this was going to be the first ever research and teaching hospice with home care, bereavement, follow-up and other things built in, which the earlier hospices, of which there weren't very many anyway,

Dame Cicely Saunders19:38

hadn't really integrated into what they were doing. And the idea of actually getting down and seeing how you can really make symptom control much more scientific.

Dame Cicely Saunders19:48

as well as the at the same time looking at the whole spiritual, social, emotional side and bringing the two together.

Presenter19:56

Uh Uh But I've always thought that a hospice, frankly, was somewhere where people went ultimately to die. But you say no people go home again?

Dame Cicely Saunders20:03

Oh, yes, indeed. Some hospices have a very high discharge rate and ours is quite high. And some people come in and out. And we have a number of people, of course, coming up to our day centre. About twenty are there every day, of which most of those will be coming up from home, and some of them will be with us for quite a long time. But what people are really looking for

Presenter20:24

Bye, pick.

Dame Cicely Saunders20:24

Uh

Presenter20:24

Zoo

Dame Cicely Saunders20:24

And

Presenter20:25

Yeah. Root is reassurance.

Presenter20:28

They want you to tell em it'll be all right.

Dame Cicely Saunders20:29

They all

Dame Cicely Saunders20:30

They don't necessarily realize how f near the end they are. You don't have to know that you're near the end of your life to come into a hospice. I mean, the the commitment may be we can do something about your pain or we can do something about your breathlessness or whatever it may be.

Dame Cicely Saunders20:46

Then most people do know within themselves, and on the whole.

Dame Cicely Saunders20:51

Sharing is better than deception if you're going to be able to fight the right battle, as it were.

Presenter20:57

But if they're

Presenter20:59

facing the truth, the truth that death is at hand, they must be asking you those um fundamental and unanswerable questions, you know, what is life about and and and

Dame Cicely Saunders21:02

Yeah.

Presenter21:11

What does death mean? How do you how do you answer that?

Dame Cicely Saunders21:13

Booms.

Dame Cicely Saunders21:15

Depends entirely on the relationship between the person they ask, and may very often be a nurse, not necessarily the chaplain, may be a doctor.

Dame Cicely Saunders21:24

The relationship that that person has already with the patient and the sort of exchange, because truth is much more in a relationship than just in words. And there are many times when you have to say, I don't know.

Dame Cicely Saunders21:36

Better that than a platitude. Oh yes, platitudes don't work. But to be able to just share, perhaps not say anything, because quite often all that somebody wants is for you to just stay there, to appreciate that what they're facing.

Dame Cicely Saunders21:51

is very hard and

Dame Cicely Saunders21:54

We don't want to smooth everything over and say everybody is cheerful in a hospice, but we do want to say things are real and reality.

Dame Cicely Saunders22:02

when you come to terms with it, has an extraordinary amount of joy hidden there.

Dame Cicely Saunders22:07

Record number five.

Dame Cicely Saunders22:10

Uh we're going back to the time when I was a houseman.

Dame Cicely Saunders22:14

and back into the uh Saint Thomas's Choir.

Dame Cicely Saunders22:18

And once or twice we had the enormous honour of being conducted by Vaughan Williams himself, so I'm choosing the lark ascending.

Presenter23:29

Part of Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending, played by Barry Griffiths with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Andre Previn. Well, now, Dame Cicely Saunders, you must tell me about the third Pole in your life, and how you met him. Now his name is, and you might have to help me here, Marianne Bokuschishko. You've done very well.

Presenter23:47

But it was his work, not him, that you uh first came across, I think, back in sixteen Yeah.

Dame Cicely Saunders23:51

Uh

Presenter23:51

Yeah.

Dame Cicely Saunders23:51

Well, I was um still really grieving for Antony.

Dame Cicely Saunders23:56

and I was driving back from the public library and I saw a picture through a window of a gallery.

Dame Cicely Saunders24:02

and I stopped and and went in, and it was the last half hour of a one man show.

Dame Cicely Saunders24:08

And I went round thinking I I absolutely got to have one of these, because I discovered also it was a Pole who came from the same city as Antony and was about the same age actually.

Dame Cicely Saunders24:18

and um I couldn't afford the big picture I had seen in the window.

Dame Cicely Saunders24:21

But because I wanted another one of Christ Stilling the Storm so badly the the gallery let me have it half price.

Dame Cicely Saunders24:29

And I went back home thinking, What have I done? I'd never bought a picture before in my life. Anyway, I went back to the gallery and I got his address, and I wrote and thanked him for having painted such a picture, and said I hoped we'd be able to afford one of the bigger ones for our chapel when we opened the hospice.

Dame Cicely Saunders24:47

And he wrote back and said it was the most important thing that had happened in his life and invited me to his students' exhibition, and that's how we met. So if you're going to fall in love with an artist, it's rather special to fall in love with his art first. Indeed. But he wasn't free at the time. He was married. No, his wife was in Poland. He'd been taken prisoner of war in 1939 and his wife had never come out.

Speaker 125:03

And there is

Dame Cicely Saunders25:10

and he'd stayed out as really a political refugee. And um we had a relationship um meeting as friends for a long time. When did you finally become Mrs Bokushishko? Nearly fourteen years ago, but I had known him.

Dame Cicely Saunders25:25

Now I've known him for nearly thirty years. But so you were in your sixties when you eventually married. Oh yes, we we were very old. Um but that didn't make any difference to it being a very exciting thing and a final sort of coming home to love. Was it was it also something you'd always want you always wanted to be married? Yes, I had.

Presenter25:28

Oh yes, we

Dame Cicely Saunders25:41

I had not found it easy not to be married, but every time I thought about it I would then think of a particular patient or somebody and that well, if I had been I wouldn't have met them.

Dame Cicely Saunders25:51

So it worked out. There's a an anthology put together by Crews for Bereaved People with the title All in the End is Harvest.

Dame Cicely Saunders26:01

And I think I would say that was true. Now he's eighteen years your senior.

Dame Cicely Saunders26:06

Yeah.

Presenter26:06

Yes, he's nearly ninety three now. So it's it's presumably now he who gets the greatest benefit of your from your caring abilities.

Dame Cicely Saunders26:15

Yes, I spend a lot of time looking after him. Um but he's a very nice person to look after. Maddening sometimes, like all all people.

Dame Cicely Saunders26:24

And this record's for him, I think. This record is for him, because he is pretty deaf and he really does find it difficult to listen to music, although he'll watch it on television. But he will listen to Beethoven, the Seventh Symphony, because it's it's full of rhythm and sound and it gets through his to his deafness.

Presenter27:40

Part of the third movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. Seven played by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Carl Berm.

Presenter27:46

You must have been asked on many occasions, Dame Cicely, to help someone who's dying. That's the euphemism, the usual euphemism for euthanasia, for offering that final lethal injection. What do you say, or what have you said, in the past when people have asked you that?

Dame Cicely Saunders28:01

Well, first of all, it isn't many occasions. It is in a way surprising.

Dame Cicely Saunders28:06

How people change, or how few people actually think of it, although more do now than did earlier on in my career.

Dame Cicely Saunders28:14

But the whole problem of people who want to have their life ended

Dame Cicely Saunders28:20

may be insoluble for that particular person. I don't disagree, I don't dispute, that there are some people who feel there is no other way for them but that.

Dame Cicely Saunders28:31

But the real problem is, I think, a social one.

Dame Cicely Saunders28:35

that if that was made possible by law,

Dame Cicely Saunders28:38

then it would pull the rug from under a whole lot of vulnerable people. It would make them not just a right to die, but a duty. I'm nothing now but a burden and I ought to opt out. And although my that might be very subconscious, I think it would get through. And I'm afraid the

Dame Cicely Saunders28:57

The changed attitude of society over the whole area of abortion doesn't make us feel very happy that safeguards and so on would keep things to the very limited area which people are often talking about.

Presenter29:10

But what about in the case of a a degenerative disease such as motor neurone, where someone is is losing control of his or her physical functions and where they they begin to suffer awful indignities? Haven't such people a right to ask while they're still fully physically functioning that they be given a way out when eventually they need it?

Presenter29:30

Yeah.

Dame Cicely Saunders29:30

I I still come back to I don't think you can have that without undermining uh a very important value in society, the value of dependent people.

Dame Cicely Saunders29:41

And we have looked after two to three hundred patients with motor neuron disease in St Christopher's in the years that we've been open. It's very few who have gone on saying they would like something because they have found within dependence there can be a surprising independence and an independence of spirit.

Dame Cicely Saunders30:01

With most patients, there is something to discover. I'm not saying it's true for everybody, but I do think that the way

Dame Cicely Saunders30:10

to look at these patients is always as a very individual person and to give them the feeling that they matter to you and that their miseries matter too, and that you're prepared to listen to them, do what you can to support.

Dame Cicely Saunders30:27

And that's what we can offer.

Dame Cicely Saunders30:29

I think law is a very blunt instrument in a very complex and difficult situation.

Dame Cicely Saunders30:36

And lawmakers can make terrible mistakes which are then very difficult to unpick.

Dame Cicely Saunders30:42

Record number seven.

Dame Cicely Saunders30:43

We are going to something quite different.

Dame Cicely Saunders30:46

back to my singing again. And this is Saint Christopher's had a choir, and we even joined with another choir and sang Haydn's Creation in Norwich Cathedral. And so we're going to choose something out of the creation, The Heavens Are Telling the Glory of God.

Speaker 431:27

The day that is coming speech is the day.

Speaker 131:29

Forming space of the

Speaker 431:36

The night that is gone to following night.

Presenter32:03

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, and The Heavens Are Telling the Glory of God from Haydn's Creation. What about may I ask you about your own death? I know that most of us, I'm sure, would would want death to be as speedy and as painless as as possible, um but I understand that wouldn't be your choice at all.

Presenter32:22

I would like to

Dame Cicely Saunders32:22

I have time.

Dame Cicely Saunders32:24

I think one needs time to say thank you. One needs time to say I'm sorry.

Dame Cicely Saunders32:30

And now needs time to sort out something of yourself and what really matters, until perhaps you can finally reach the place where, as it were, you can say, Well, I'm me, and it's all right.

Dame Cicely Saunders32:45

And of course I am would be facing death as as a Christian.

Dame Cicely Saunders32:51

With the belief that I won't travel that journey alone, and although it is into mystery.

Dame Cicely Saunders32:55

It is a mystery of love.

Dame Cicely Saunders32:57

But we wouldn't ever want to impose that feeling upon our own patients unless they came forward and asked for us.

Dame Cicely Saunders33:06

When David died I had the strong, strong feeling that he had come in his own way to the right place for him.

Dame Cicely Saunders33:14

and that freedom of the spirit was another of the things that he left us as the principles of hospice.

Dame Cicely Saunders33:22

Last record.

Dame Cicely Saunders33:24

Well, I'm I'm choosing something from John Rutter's Requiem, the last number of all.

Dame Cicely Saunders33:31

Because I think it gives the peace which I do believe the many, many people that I've known over the years have finally reached for themselves.

Presenter34:41

Looks I Turner from John Rutter's Requiem sung by Donna Deem with the City of London Sinfonia conducted by John Rutter.

Presenter34:49

If you could only take one of those records, Dame Cicely. I'd have to take my husband's, the Beethoven.

Presenter34:55

And blast it

Dame Cicely Saunders34:55

Out loud on your island. That's right. What about your book? The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

Dame Cicely Saunders35:02

Because that will give you so many things to go on thinking about. And your luxury.

Dame Cicely Saunders35:07

I write bad poetry in times of stress, so can I have lots of paper and and pens or pencils.

Dame Cicely Saunders35:15

and you'll write your poetry and play your Beethoven.

Dame Cicely Saunders35:18

And hope to be rescued? Oh, yes, I I'm not a survivor. I I wouldn't do anything about trying to get away.

Dame Cicely Saunders35:25

Dame Cicely Saunders.

Presenter35:26

Thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you. I've enjoyed it. Yeah.

Speaker 135:38

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Speaker 436:24

Uh