I READ with interest the moving story of Simon Bray who sadly recently died of bowel cancer (The Argus, June 15).

My beloved sister, Nadine Bertho, was diagnosed with inoperable bowel cancer in 2004. As in the case of Simon, the disease also spread to other parts of her body.

She had been an exceptionally attractive woman who worked in show business [pictured], but when she died 16 months later, she too looked like a skeleton.

However, in her case, she never lost her love of life and remained positive to the end.

She did undergo some very exhaustive chemotherapy, but never experienced any agonising pain.

I was constantly with her for the last four months of her life. I dreaded the end, but my fears were to be unfounded.

She simply faded away peacefully over a period of three weeks. We were never so close than during these final four months. Every second mattered.

I do not believe assisted suicide is the answer. All of our efforts should be focused on improving palliative care.

Often, a terminally ill patient may wish to hasten their death, not because of a fear of pain, or of loss of dignity, or of being a burden on others, but because they feel responsible for the emotional suffering which they are unwittingly inflicting on the people they love the most. They just want it all to end.

We have been conditioned in our modern world to think that life is not worth living wherever suffering is involved.

This is simply not true; in the case of Simon, his wishes sadly could not be fulfilled, but they precisely defined, at the most traumatic time in his life, his true character.

Wars, famines, natural disasters, abject poverty, illness, accidents, disabilities and other suffering is around us all of the time.

Life may sometimes seem cheap but this is exactly what we must never lose sight of: life is precious. The solution can never be in the taking of a life, but instead striving to get to the root cause of the problem and trying to eliminate it.

Instinctively, it would appear this is exactly what Simon was trying to do for others through at least two of his wishes. The sad loss of a great man.

Nicole Pendlebury, Wilbury Villas, Hove