Bertie Daniel was 15 when his father Lawrie, who was suffering with Multiple Sclerosis, took his own life in the absence of a voluntary assisted dying law in NSW. In a letter sent to politicians Bertie, now 21, shares his story and his family's ongoing trauma. Click here to sign his petition.

When Tom Barry asked how he was going to die from his metastatic facial cancer doctors said it could involve choking, pneumonia, skin eruptions, stroke and bleeding. Denied access to a voluntary assisted dying law in NSW, the reality was far worse.

When Dad died, writes Susan, I was relieved his suffering was over. Had Voluntary Assisted Dying been legal in NSW, his end of life could have been totally different.

Amahl Haradasa died cruelly of motor neurone disease in 2019. His wife Emma says NSW must pass the voluntary assisted dying law. "Many of us, who have seen just how bad death can be, don’t want to leave it up to chance.”

Desperately ill with three kinds of cancer and without access to a voluntary assisted dying law, Ken Dickson saw no way to end his suffering other than to take his own life. "What he went through at the end was horrific."

Doctors assured Maryanne Platt that palliative care would ease her mother Philomena’s suffering form an enlarged heart and dysphagia, a difficulty swallowing. Instead she died slowly and painfully over 17 days. 

When Scone man Ray Philpott's lung cancer spread, the pain became unbearable. His daughter Angela says: "I cannot speak highly enough of the care we received from palliative care but ultimately it wasn’t enough".

My husband Bruce died in February. He should have died at Christmas-time because that was what he wished. He had no choice because in NSW there is currently no law for voluntary assisted dying.

I am a senior pain specialist. I lost my wife three years ago. At the age of 42 and after living with leukaemia for 14 years she was dying and took her own life one day when I went to work. 

"It was so hard to watch a man who had so much dignity, die without it," says Sydney woman Donna Adolfson of her husband Mark's death at the age of 61..