Cliff Richard "Why I Would Consider Enthanasia"

Sir Cliff Richard has discussed the possibility of euthanasia with his family and said he does not want to “go on too long” if diagnosed with dementia. The singer’s mother, Dorothy, suffered from Alzheimer’s and he said it was a terrible thing to witness her slow decline. The experience led Sir Cliff, who turned 70 last week, to discuss his own death with family members. “It doesn’t haunt me but I have discussed it with my sister and I said, ‘If this happens to me, don’t let it go on too long - and make sure I am looked after, as I don’t want to be a burden on anybody else’,” he said. “I may live to be 100. It may happen at 90. They may well allow euthanasia. The terrible thing is that dementia doesn’t take your life but it removes it away from you - you don’t have a life.” Sir Cliff’s mother died in 2007, aged 87, a decade after her diagnosis. The singer is a patron of the Alzheimer’s Research UK and campaigns to raise awareness of the disease. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour programme, he said of his mother’s decline: “It was a gradual change and it steamrollered. In the last four years she didn’t know who I was. If she referred to me, she would call me, ‘that Cliff Richard’. “I said to my sister, ‘When mum dies it won’t be bad because we have already mourned the loss of a mother’. She stopped being the woman we knew.” The singer has three younger sisters but did not say which one of them was involved in the conversation. By Anita Singh Daily Telegraph www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8830679/Cliff-Richard-why-I-would-consider-euthanasia.html