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The best palliative care in the world "will not stop the mental suffering of someone who is waiting to die", a woman who cared for her dying sister has warned MPs as they prepare to vote on . Catherine Eden, 52, moved in with younger sibling Claire to support her for seven months before she died of appendix .

Claire, who was just 45, underwent after her 2019 diagnosis and was initially told she might survive the disease for around 10 years. But it progressed more quickly than expected. Catherine said her sister was not in physical agony, although the cancer meant she struggled to keep food down. She said: "Claire got really good palliative care but it was the mental suffering, the anguish, and the mental pain of waiting to die while not really living that was really hard.

"It's that knowledge that you're going to die. You could have the best palliative care in the world, but you would still be living with that."

Claire received a good medical redundancy payout and was lucky that Catherine was able to move from Brighton to Archway, North London, to care for her.

The family was also well supported by a local hospice and Marie Curie staff, despite the pressures of at the time.

But Catherine said: "Despite all of these things, it could never be enough. I remember towards the very end they said to her, 'would you like to be asleep for some of the time or most of the time?'

"I think that was a kind way of saying, 'do you want to not know what's going on so much?'

"And you just think, so it's alright to dull people's mental awareness? I understand they had to act within the law but why could Claire not have the choice to say 'I've had enough.'?"

When the sisters previously discussed assisted dying, social worker Claire said she was "anxious that vulnerable people might feel they should die".

But as her own terminal illness took its toll, she asked Catherine to look into the option of travelling to Dignitas. Although Claire could afford the cost of travelling to , estimated at around £15,000, her illness progressed too quickly.

The sisters' final days together were marked by a "sense of weary waiting about when this is going to end", Catherine said.

She added: "This particular cancer was described to me as, essentially, you almost starve to death at the end. It's like a mechanical failure of your stomach.

"Claire was somebody who liked to live gently, nicely and happily, and she just didn't want to deal with this. She wanted an option to get out.

"She was somebody who just wanted to live life - but this was not living."

Catherine spent some of her childhood in Oregon, where assisted dying has been legal since 1997.

On Friday, MPs will hold a crucial vote on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which proposes a similar law for England and Wales and is backed by the Express crusade.

Opponents have argued that the bill should be dropped in favour of efforts to improve palliative care in the UK.

Catherine urged MPs to recognise that "however good palliative care is, it will not stop the mental suffering of someone who is waiting to die".

She added: "It would have been such a mental relief to know that option was there, and that you didn't have to travel and there weren't any hoops to jump through.

"Just knowing that you have that option there that you can use, whenever it feels right to you, I think that would have taken away some of that stress.

"I have no way of knowing how or when Claire would have exercised it but I would have liked her to have that choice, and I really want that choice for myself."