The thing almost every parent dreads most of all is that one of their children might die before they do. We, the parents, are the ones who should go first. We raise our children to independent adulthood and then, purpose fulfilled, fade away while they go on to raise the next generation.

The death of a child breaks that cycle. Somehow, however illogically, it seems to the parents that they have failed in their duty to protect – even if the death was the result of accident or illness that they could have no control over.

How much greater must the grief and anguish be, then, if you have been instrumental in helping that death to occur? My heart goes out to Julie and Mark James, who travelled with their quadriplegic son Dan to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland so he could be helped to end a life which he considered to be no longer worth living on his terms.

He was an action man, paralysed in all his limbs by a rugby accident and in need of 24-hour care. Some stricken individuals, in the same circumstances, might consider themselves fortunate that they still have the gift of life and go on to make the best they can of it.

To Dan James, though, his situation was intolerable. Three times he tried to take his own life. He was determined to die but incapable of bringing it about on his own. So his parents, after what must have been unimaginable agonies of soul-searching, concluded that they had no alternative other than to help him. What a tremendous act of courage and love.

What Julie and Mark James did was, in its own way, because of the parental duty to protect. By making it possible for Dan to die with dignity, as he wished, they were protecting him from what he would have considered to be a fate worse than death.

I very much hope that the Crown Prosecution Service, which has been sent a report from the police, will take a compassionate view and decline to put them through the additional ordeal of a court action – although nothing could be worse than what they’ve already been through.

Those few countries which allow assisted suicide do so on the basis that the person seeking to die is of sound mind.

What, though, about the many people whose minds are no longer sound – that vast and growing army of dementia patients who exist in a twilight world, living in homes where they spend their endless confused days not knowing who they are, where they are and how they came to be there?

Theirs, too, could be considered a fate worse than death. And they are no more capable of ending it than was Dan James. Who is going to take the decision on their behalf to help them make a dignified exit from life? That’s the massive moral dilemma society is going to have to confront eventually.