As a female semi-rural GP involved in palliative care for the past 25 years, I have helped many patients and their family attain a ‘positive’ death experience through psychological, spiritual and medical support.

My father George always said he wanted to go home and die in his own country. He and my mother Margie were both born in South Africa but lived briefly in Australia in the 1990s. They returned to South Africa in 1991 and my dad died there in 1993, aged 82. 

I can't wait to stop talking and start walking – all the way from Victoria's Parliament House to the front steps of our own Parliament House in Western Australia. 

My husband Russell was ill for 20 years – ten of those in chronic pain, riddled with arthritis in his spine. Even after all that time, when he was first diagnosed with neuroendocrine lung cancer, he was ready to fight – to throw everything at it.

My wife Dorothy Maxine Philip received a diagnosis of an inoperable cancer of the stomach in 2015. If she had been 40 years younger she would have had perhaps a 20 per cent survival chance with a very major operation. At age 78 there was no chance of anything being done surgically or medically.

My dad Dusty Miller was a Vietnam Veteran and founder of the now iconic Birdsville Bakery. 

When I was 17 years old I worked as a medical secretary at the Perth Radiological clinic. It was the late 50s or early 60s and it was my first job out of school. I used to see these really sad people who had long-term cancer coming in for X-ray therapy treatment, though it wasn’t all about cancer. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

I’m 44. A Dad to two young children. A husband, a doctor and I’m dying.

Regrettably there has been both a sibling and some friends to whom I have had to say goodbye to after their struggles with terminal illness but the first and the one that has stayed with me for decades happened in 1960 when I was 12.

My mother had been a strong opponent of assisted dying all her life until at the end of her life she was dying of fibrosis of the lungs, she was in pain, gasping for breath, too weak to control her bodily wastes and due to lack of oxygen fearful of losing her keen mind.