‘My husband chose an assisted death… but it’s hard on those left behind’

If you were to meet Debbie Binner at a party – as I did, at Christmas last year – you would imagine she was the luckiest woman in the world. She is stunning and vivacious, in love with her partner, and a proud mother and grandmother. Fate must have smiled on this woman, you think. But you could hardly be more mistaken.

Binner, 55, has been through some of the toughest times life can bring. First, she lost her 18-year-old daughter, Chloe, after a three-year cancer battle. Then, within two years, her beloved husband, Simon, had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND), later choosing to take his own life at a clinic in Switzerland. Just to add to that load, his death was filmed by a BBC documentary team. In the hierarchy of suffering, this woman has stared into the depths – and somehow managed to emerge as the happiest person I’ve ever met. How?

There are plenty of clues in her new book. It chronicles her devastation, but more than anything it is a testament to her resilience – something we can all learn from. Debbie has managed to fold her tumultuous losses into herself and emerge stronger, wiser and – the truly astonishing thing – happier. Even more significant, she doesn’t make excuses for her happiness, and refuses to feel guilty about it.

“The first Christmas after Chloe died, I spoke to someone else who’d lost their child, and they said: ‘We don’t do Christmas any more, we cancelled it,’ ” she remembers. “I was shocked, and asked: ‘How long is it since your child died?’ They said 13 years – and I thought: ‘Oh my God, I can’t grieve for that long.’ ”

Debbie’s first big loss came when she was 19 and her mother – whom she describes as glamorous and wonderful, but who was an alcoholic – died of bowel cancer. “I was living in Italy and came home for the funeral, then I went back and had the best two years of my life,” she says. “I realised quickly that life is for living. I also learnt young that out of the worst of times can come the very best the world has to offer. Being in the eye of the storm can help you see the best version of yourself.”

Back in England, she got a job as a trainee journalist and met the man who would become the father of her two daughters, Hannah and Chloe. But the couple split when the girls were five and 18 months old. “I’m best in adversity,” says Debbie. “When he went, I had no job and couldn’t pay the mortgage.” 

But what she did have was one of the hallmarks of resilience: self-belief, even against the odds. “I wanted to be a television presenter, so I went to one of the cable channels and I said, how about taking me on? And they did.” 

Survival is sometimes about choice – that’s another lesson Debbie has learnt. “You can choose to give up, or you can choose to keep going,” she says. She chose to swim, not sink; and a few years later, when Cambridge-educated businessman Simon Binner appeared on her horizon, she wasn’t particularly impressed. “We met at a dinner party and he ignored me the whole evening,” she recalls. “When he phoned the following week, I couldn’t immediately place him.”

Simon later told Debbie that he had noticed her immediately. “We were married within six months,” she says. “He was very amusing, super-bright, glamorous, an Alpha male. He was a really good man, and he always did the right thing. And he completely took my girls on; he loved my daughters the same way he loved Zoe, his own child.”

For a few years, life was good. So when Chloe, then 15, began to complain of a pain in her leg, her mother thought nothing of it and reached for the paracetamol. But a few weeks later things hadn’t improved. Eventually they got a hospital referral, and Debbie remembers the grave look on the doctor’s face.

“He said Chloe had bone cancer and I turned to my beautiful girl – with her gorgeous long hair, who was looking great in her leather trousers – and I thought, how bad can it be?” she explains. “I said: ‘Is it curable?’ and he replied: ‘It’s treatable.’ It was a long time before I understood that that was different.”

It was then that Debbie made another choice. “I started truly living in the moment,” she says. “I began to see life through a different lens. We made friends; Chloe made friends. We saw truly awful things – but I felt more alive than I’d ever felt.”

Chloe lived for another three years, dying at home two weeks after her 18th birthday, in February 2013. Two years later, when Simon was diagnosed with MND, Debbie remembers thinking: “We’ll get through this.” At first, the prognosis was that he might live for three years, but the ground shifted from beneath them like quicksand.

“His disease was moving so fast, it was like being in a horror film,” she remembers. “He was slurring his speech, falling over, unable to even put his hands out to stop himself.”

Debbie thinks it was this rapid deterioration that made Simon panic. The Alpha male couldn’t allow himself to be vulnerable; he wanted to take control. “He was always quite rash, and when he started talking about going to Switzerland, I thought things would change,” she says. By the time she realised his mind wouldn’t be changed, it was too late – Simon had tried to take his own life at home. Debbie realised how serious he was about going through with it. 

How did it feel when they got to the clinic where Simon was due to die? 

“I was numb and empty – I felt battered, cornered. It’s one of the things that’s very different about an ‘assisted’, as opposed to a ‘natural’, death,” she says. Having a TV crew present could have been intrusive and yet, says Debbie, they helped the couple process their feelings via interviews. On their final night together, the Binners just held one another in silence. “We’d said everything we needed to say,” says Debbie. “It was just love by then.”

Today, she has mixed feelings about his choice. “It’s fashionable to say assisted dying is a good thing and I think it will be allowed here eventually,” she says. “But unless you’ve been there, you can’t truly know what’s involved, and it’s incredibly complicated – especially the way other people are left behind.” Grieving after Simon’s death, she continues, was different: everything had been organised, and there were other people’s judgments to deal with, as well as the practicalities. 

The Binners had talked about Debbie’s life after Simon had gone. “He said, you’re too young to be on your own – I want you to be happy.” She met her new partner, Tim, through friends within six months of Simon’s death; she was, she says, done with grieving, and couldn’t let him slip through her fingers. The pair now live together in a beautiful house in south London.

“Once you’ve had one good relationship, you recognise what will make another one,” says Debbie, who has remained close to Simon’s mother and daughter.  

Again, she is grasping life with both hands, more aware than most of its fragility, but keen to make the most of every moment of happiness. “I could have slid into the shadows, become a victim,” she adds. “But I refuse to do that. I’m fiercer than I’ve ever been.”

Yet Here I Am: One Woman’s Story of Life After Loss by Deborah Binner (Splendid Publications, £9.99). Buy now for £8.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk, or call 0844 871 1514