I'VE been thinking about my mother this week.
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She was just 49 when she died after a decade-long battle with a brain tumour that refused to be removed.
She endured six operations, each between eight and 14 hours, and spent the last year of her life bed-ridden in hospital, almost blinded by the tumour in her head and barley able to speak, but close to family who would visit her daily.
My mother held on long enough to meet her first two grandchildren but was not around for my wedding nor to see me become a father.
I think of her often but she has particularly been in my thoughts this week after Victoria became the first Australian state to legalise voluntary euthanasia.
That move will naturally see the NSW government come under renewed pressure to follow suit, but I believe they are right to be cautious.
In her prime, my mother was a strong, hard-working country woman. She is exactly the sort of person who would have said she would not want to keep living if that life was confined to a hospital bed.
But that was when she was well.
Before my mother's last operation, she was suffering terrible swelling on her brain as a result of the tumour and was blind in one eye.
My mother and father attended an appointment with her surgeon who asked her if she wanted to go through the trauma of another operation.
He made it clear that the operation would not save her life but would extend it - maybe months, maybe a couple of years. He was willing to go through the 14-hour surgery if my mother was.
Barely audibly, my mother told him: "If I can see through this one eye, I want to be here."
Her world had been reduced to a hospital room but the visits from her husband, her father, sons and young grandchildren brought her enough joy to want to keep fighting.
What she thought when she was ill was very different to what she thought when she was well.
None of this is to say NSW should not one day allow euthanasia. I believe it is inevitable and I believe it is right to give critically ill people the dignity of choosing the time and manner of their death.
But my mother's story offers just one more insight into a tremendously complex debate and helps explain why it is right for our politicians to tread carefully.
NSW will eventually get there, but we must get it right.