Still Climbing

Cherry Armstrong is passionate about relieving suffering and making a difference — and goodness, she does! During her career as a nursing sister, her training in palliative care at Highway Hospice in Durban led her to go above and beyond for the patients, families and staff there. She initiated a fundraising project called Celebrate Life that saw her climbing Kilimanjaro with a team of ordinary women who became extraordinary women, and they raised a staggering R1 million in the process for Hospice.

“That is where it all started,” Cherry recalls, and these days Celebrate Life SA Global is a thriving NGO with a mission to ‘create awareness and facilitate support across society to alleviate human and environmental suffering.’ She also went on to write a book called ‘Cancer: Navigating the Journey’ — a practical guide for newly diagnosed cancer patients and their loved ones.

For Cherry, her fierce support for medical assistance in dying (MAiD) is a natural extension of her commitment to relieving suffering, and it is not at odds at all with her palliative care training.

“I have always believed in MAiD and been a champion for it. My 97 year old mother lived and died in Australia where it is legal and in the last months of her life she repeatedly asked for assisted dying. I tried to help her from afar but the doctor at the retirement home where she lived was not supportive and mom never got her dying wish.”

Cherry carries her mother’s unfulfilled wish with her, not as a wound, but as a compass. It is what draws her to DignitySA’s constitutional challenge, and why she is inspired to be an active member.

“Nobody should have to beg to die with dignity,” she says. “Not my mother. Not anyone.”

For someone who has spent a lifetime scaling mountains, literal and otherwise, to help others, Cherry knows that the hardest climbs are the ones most worth making. The campaign for access to medical assistance in dying in South Africa is exactly that kind of climb and, with fierce, compassionate people like Cherry supporting us, we’re motivated to keep climbing.