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The End of Life Bill published this week marks a historic moment for a country with one of the most punitive approaches to assisted dying for terminally ill people in the liberal world.

But here at Media Storm, something confuses us about the debate now unfolding in the news, which is the distinctive lack of voices of people for whom the bill is designed.

They are out there, and they are not voiceless. So we can only conclude it is because the British are terrified of looking at death. But some have no choice but to stare death in the eyes, and to refuse to hear them is to abandon them to face it alone.

This column is dedicated to the dying, dead, and their loved ones, who spoke to me on Media Storm podcast and forever changed my view on assisted dying. Theirs are the testimonies we must not look away from, and that anyone refusing legal reform must answer to.

Kit is 38, and always will be. She is obsessed with animals and happiest in the middle of a salt marsh by the coast. When we speak, she has stage four breast cancer, and is spending her days fighting for a future she will not live to see.

"I dream of a future where assisted dying is an option for people like me," she said, "that we get the option to die how we want".

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Helping a person to end their own life in the UK is a criminal offence with a penalty of up to 14 years jail. It is legal in 11 US states, Canada, most of Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Austria, Ecuador, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany, with more countries in the process of legalisation. The UK's stance confuses Kit.

I like to delude myself that I've got more rights than a dog in this country. If a dog was left to die of cancer, you'd give that dog a cuddle and let the vet give it an injection. I don't fully understand why so many people would faint from horror at the thought of hearing a dog screaming in agony but have no real issue with the idea of a human doing that

Kit, who has stage four breast cancer

She tells me she has lost her voice screaming from pain in hospital wards, and it is not how she wants to die. She wants to die in her husband's arms.

Written here, these words outlive Kit, just like the cause she fought for. She died a few months after we spoke. I will spare you the details, it was not the death she asked for.

Opponents to reform focus on the sanctity of life, risks of abuse and the slippery slope of legalisation, but a scary phenomenon is happening in its absence. There is a suicide endemic among terminally ill people in the UK, with an estimated 650 taking their own lives each year through unsafe and often violent means.

I am about to do something reporters should almost never do and include details of a method of suicide (suicide being a tricky term in this context). This is not done lightly, but because it is vital to understand what many people suffering with terminal illness resort to in lieu of medically-assisted alternatives.

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