We’ve all heard or read about the very moving case of the 14-year-old girl who was terminally ill with cancer and who wished to have her body cryogenically frozen when she died, in the hope that she could be brought back to life at some point in the future when there may be a chance that her illness can be cured.
The girl’s case, in which her mother was in favour of her daughter’s wishes, but her estranged father, who was divorced from her mother, was not, was decided in the family division of the High Court. It ruled in favour of the girl’s wishes, saying that her mother should have sole responsibility for her post mortem arrangements.
The leading judge in the case, Mr Justice Peter Jackson, described it as “a tragic combination of childhood illness and family conflict” and “only one of its kind to have come before the courts in this country, and probably anywhere else”.
Juliette Dalrymple
Family Matters’ director and highly experience mediator, Juliette Dalrymple, thinks that this is an example of a family dispute in which mediation could have offered the opportunity to have sorted it out without having to go to court. She says
“Of course we know that mediation is not appropriate in all cases where parents cannot agree on such major decisions as this, but, in my opinion, it would absolutely have helped on this occasion. This case, where two parents were in the depths of grief and a teenager was struggling to come to terms with the end of her life, should never have been one that came to court. The end of a young life is always a tragedy. As a parent, having survived the desperate fragility of childhood, only to face the loss of the potential, hope, energy and optimism of the future adult, and a life you hoped to know, is devastating. Court was no place for a decision to be made here, where grief was mixed with the complexity and confusion of being separated parents. Yes, a decision was made, but at what cost to the people involved?
Mediation might have offered everyone a way of understanding and resolving the differences between the parents about their daughter and helped to hear what she was actually saying and what she could not say. There was no doubt she was loved by both her parents and will continue to be remembered as a courageous teenager who did not want to leave the life she loved and wanted to find a way to stay for herself and, perhaps, for them.”
You can read the Telegraph’s story about this case here.
