The stress-related episode with stroke-like symptoms trapped Ms Boydell, of Garden Suburb, in a state of suspended semi-awareness that frightened her ex-paramedic husband Dave Hopkins.

“I was in a full dementia for four hours. I was conscious but I was not aware of where I was,” she said.

“Since then, I feel like I’ve been somewhere else.”

When she recovered, Ms Boydell left her 25-year TAFE position teaching maritime navigation to train as an end of life doula, an emerging profession that aims to bring compassion and comfort to people who are terminally ill.

The doula ethos – making the time before someone’s death less lonely and “medicalised”, giving them options – feeds into the long-running and emotive debate in NSW about euthanasia.

Nationals MLC Trevor Khan will formally initiate the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill in parliament on September 21 with a second reading speech in the upper house, and formal debate to begin next month.

The bill would give terminally ill patients who are aged over 25 and expected to die within a year the right to ask for medical help to end their lives, if they are in severe pain or incapacitated.

It’s a topic on which Ms Boydell, 60, says she hasn’t completely made up her mind. But she says political leaders have a moral duty to disentangle questions of medicine from those of personal freedom.

“It seems pretty cruel when we’ll take the dog to the vet for the injection but you can’t take your loved ones,” she said.

“It’s a bit like the same-sex marriage vote. The people who don’t agree with it are free not to participate in the outcome.”

The tide of public opinion is behind legalising euthanasia, Ms Boydell believes. In the meantime she will open a “death cafe” at her house this month, emulating an “agenda-free” format that invites informal discussion of euthanasia.

Ms Boydell said the appetite to talk about euthanasia may convince her to host a cafe once a month.

“I’m very invested in death as a transition,” she said. “Death is not a failure.”

The Herald, Newcastle