DEATH, when it came for Sylvia Hudson’s mother, was protracted and humiliating, with the 99-year-old lying helpless in a hospital bed for months.

The once-spirited businesswoman was so physically incapacitated that she could not swallow and her skin was covered in cuts and bruises. Creeping senility meant that she struggled to recognise her son. Towards the end, she greeted each new day with incredulity, rasping: “Why have I woken up?”

Sylvia, now 79, refused to allow doctors to administer an intravenous drip. The offer of morphine was, however, gratefully taken up, bringing to a premature end a long and happy life and what Sylvia believes was an unnecessary period of physical and psychological agony.

Sylvia believes in euthanasia, as do many of her neighbours, elderly residents in sheltered accommodation in Tooting, South London. She would have consented to a lethal injection on her mother’s behalf. “I loved my mother all my life but seeing her like that was agony. They don’t keep sick animals alive, do they? It is considered cruel. Why do it with people?

“They helped my mother along artificially but I still wish it had been a few weeks earlier. They wanted to feed her through the stomach; I said no. They wanted to feed her through the nose; I said no. All I kept saying is, ‘Let her die gracefully.’ It was the worst year of my life.”

And yet Sylvia Hudson has qualms about the Government’s plans to introduce “living wills”, which would legally entitle people to decide in advance whether they want to die should they become ill, or to pass the decision to a third party. The heart of the problem, she said, lies not in the spectre of gold-digging offspring keen to do away prematurely with their parents but with the tricky business of talking about death in the first place.

She never discussed the subject with her mother, just as her neighbour, Nordica, 88, didn’t with her daughter before the younger woman died from cancer aged 58. “You don’t talk about these things,” Nordica said. “When somebody is ill there are never those scenes. I never knew if I dug deeply enough with my daughter, whether she even wanted me to dig deeply. I think she did not. Before my husband died we never talked about death.”

Her neighbour, Joan Weller, 83, is concerned about the Bill for different reasons. Two years ago her husband, Bernard, failed to recognise his grandson in a photograph. Dementia quickly set in and he is now cared for in a nursing home. Eventually his wife fears she will have to make a decision about his future. “There is absolutely no hope for him. He can’t read or write, he doesn’t know his family,” she said. “It has got to the point that he is just staring into space. He has no quality of life.”

The so-called gentle death, removing a life-supporting drip, is horrific, she said, far crueller than a lethal injection. “I think it is a good thing that there is a drive to legalise some form of euthanasia, provided it is done in the right way,” she said. “But stopping the drip is starvation.”

She wishes she had talked to Bernard about his wishes and is plagued by guilt about what she may have to decide. “Death is a subject that is not really approached very much. It never seems to crop up,” she said. “I think if we started to talk about death at our coffee meetings, people would walk out.”

In retrospect, Mrs Weller wishes she had forced the issue: “I wish I had talked to him. Death is a very sensitive subject and I think it would certainly help the relatives if they knew their loved one’s wishes.

“I can’t get any idea what Bernard is thinking. If we had discussed it I would be sure I knew what he wanted. Right now I think about it every day. It is hard not to feel guilty.”

Sylvia Hudson has instructed her daughter not to allow doctors to force feed her should her health deteriorate as her mother’s did. “I have emphasised this to my own daughter. My mother was never frightened of death but we never mentioned it. Very few people think that this kind of thing will happen to them.”

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