I didn’t want you to see me like this, Esther Rantzen told her daughter

Dame Esther Rantzen’s daughter has said her mother told her “I didn’t want you to see me like this”, in the days before her death at the age of 86.

The Childline founder and assisted dying campaigner, who had been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer in 2023, died at her home in the New Forest on September 30.

One month since her death, her daughter, Rebecca Wilcox, said she was “unbelievably devastated” by many things, including that Dame Esther was not here to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the charity.

Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, she said: “Cancer is evil.

“It’s not a new thing to say, that it takes away. It takes away the body but she still had the mind. She still had the capacity to choose, but her body let her down.

“She wanted to avoid her memory being eviscerated for us because she said to me in the last few days, this is exactly what I wanted to avoid.

“I didn’t want you to see me like this.

“I want you to remember me like this, this gorgeous person that gets arrested for bat soup and starts incredible charities and supports children and is the youngest person at heart you would ever meet – and that’s what she wanted to avoid.”

Dame Esther had become a strong proponent for assisted dying in her later years and had booked and paid to go to the Swiss right-to-die organisation Dignitas, but she was physically too frail to take the flight.

Wilcox said: “She was ready to go. She had the date, but the thing about Dignitas is you have to go before you’re actually ready to go.

“It’s a privileged death that she actually wasn’t able to take up in the end because we didn’t know that was her last chance.”

Friday marked the one-month anniversary of Dame Esther’s death.

Wilcox added: “Grief is really hard, and it’s a piece of work and it is the price you pay for having loved somebody, and god, I love mum.

“I will miss her more than I really ever thought was possible and even though we knew it was coming, it still sideswiped us.

“It’s very weird to go back to work and try and be at work, but then still have to talk about her.”

As well as setting up the children’s helpline charity Childline in 1986, Dame Esther presented That’s Life! for 21 years and later set up The Silver Line helpline for older people.