When couples have been together for a lifetime, grown old and become like two halves of one person, dread starts to stalk them.

How will the one cope when the other dies? How to contemplate life alone? Increasingly, they wake up with that question, that terrible anticipation of emptiness, and they go to sleep with it too. Understand this and you understand a lot.

Sir Edward and Lady Downes had been together for 54 years — a magnificent marriage by any measure — and their health was deteriorating. His sight and his hearing were failing; he was also in discomfort from a hip operation. She had terminal cancer. They knew that the end was coming and that the quality of life they had enjoyed was disappearing. And so before we rush to judgment about the rights and wrongs, let us grant this couple one thing: the right to make their own decisions about their lives, as they had presumably done in all the years before. Let us allow their absolute moral entitlement to choose what they considered to be a good death: together, lucidly, peacefully, and in control of their circumstances.

They euthanased themselves. It’s a kinder word to use than suicide.

Whether we, the public, considers what they did to be a good death is quite frankly immaterial. It was what the couple decided; and it was a brave, private decision. In that sense, how dare anyone be so patronising as to question it?

But of course there are shadows. The sadness, perhaps, is that the Downeses were required to leave their home and travel, in their state of physical decline, to the clinic. This is the grubby bit, the point at which it becomes the business of death: the sense of a road travelled by the desperate; of money changing hands.

Dignitas, it feels, holds a monopoly on dying; the only grim package holiday left on the shelf. Leave aside the religious reasons for not committing suicide. Those who feel that way will not be reading this. There is a general anxiety about Dignitas because it is commercial — and therefore tainted by something other than kindness — and because little by little we fear that the process of euthanasia is becoming normalised. And because, too, that process remains illegal in Britain.

The end stages of life must become better managed here. If we were more adult about addressing what old people want, we would discuss this properly and understand what a good death means. It means counselling, by someone who understands the looming loneliness; and it also means the decriminalisation of helping someone to die. The point is that sometimes proper counselling would avert a suicide and sometimes it might not, but the choice would be with the individual.

In a compassionate society, the sadness is that the Downses were not able to die together, peacefully, lucidly, in control of their circumstances and in their own home.

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