Why My Wife Had To Die

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A very tough read, by an impassioned and angry campaigner

Huntington’s disease leads to physical and mental deterioration. There is no cure. It is handed down genetically, with a 1 in 2 chance of inheritance that cannot be determined until the disease shows itself, often not until the sufferer is in their 40s.

Many do not know they carry the gene or are at risk of passing it on. Those who do know, because a parent has suffered from it, may wait a lifetime before finding out whether they are safe or not.

The prospects are horrific. After his first marriage failed, Brian Verity had a breakdown and married the woman who had nursed him back to health. Within a few years, she started showing the signs of Huntington’s that he had noticed in other members of her family and that he already had a morbid fear of.

Having fallen in love with her in hospital, he now found himself repelled by what was happening to her, fearful of his own psychological fragility and inability to cope, and yet committed to protecting her from the distress that lay in wait.

What should he have done? What should society do?

Why My Wife Had to Die is a blunt indictment of the inability of political, legal, religious and health professionals to face up to what the author regarded as incontrovertible truths.

Brian Verity lived through the trauma of finding he had married into a family whose members all carried the gene for Huntington's disease and who suffered accordingly―as he did, for other reasons. It became his mission to mitigate the consequences of their condition and educate the public about its horrors. Following his wife's suicide, he was questioned at length by the police and kept under surveillance for a year. He went on to campaign for voluntary euthanasia. He died in 2019.