I was driving home from work when I heard them talking about it.

Radio Four. The assisted dying bill. It had been moving through Parliament for months and now it was stalling. Amendments, delays, the usual machinery of things that make people uncomfortable taking longer than they should. The presenter had guests on. A doctor. A theologian. Someone from a disability rights organisation. They were all saying sensible things in careful voices and I was half-listening the way you half-listen to the radio when the traffic is moving and your mind is elsewhere.

Then they mentioned Wendy Duffy.

Wendy was fifty-six. A former care worker from the West Midlands. Her son Marcus had died four years earlier. He was twenty-three. He came home one night and she made him a cheese and onion sandwich and he fell asleep on the sofa and a tomato lodged in his windpipe and she came back into the room and found him purple. She performed CPR. She sat by his bed for five days. Then the machines were switched off.

She received a letter from the man who got Marcus's heart. He said he could play with his kids again. Another recipient was a four-year-old child.

Wendy said that's when I died too, inside.

Four years of therapy. Antidepressants. Time. None of it rebuilt her. She tried to end her life once. It almost left her on a ventilator. She did not want to do that to someone again.

So she planned. She waited until her two dogs died of old age before she set a date. She chose the music. Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars. Die With A Smile. She wore her son's T-shirt. It still smelled of him.

She died at a clinic in Basel on April 24. Full mental capacity. Her own decision.

I had to pull over.

Not dramatically. I just found a side street and sat there for a few minutes.

Because I had been on one side of this argument and this story had moved me to somewhere I wasn't expecting to be.

My position on assisted dying was not complicated. Or it wasn't, until then. People in real pain, terminal illness, months left, no quality of life. I never understood why we would ask them to endure that. We don't do it to animals. When a dog is suffering we call it mercy. When it's a human being we call it sacred and ask them to keep going. That never sat right with me. It still doesn't.

But Wendy wasn't terminally ill.

She was bereaved. She was a mother who had lost her only child in an ordinary kitchen on an ordinary night. And she was clear. She had thought it through across four years. She wasn't impulsive or irrational or in crisis in any way the law would recognise.

She just didn't want to be alive anymore.

And sitting in that side street I realised I didn't have a clean answer for that. My faith had one. My reasoning had another. And they weren't the same answer.

I grew up in a church that told me life is sacred. Not occasionally. Constantly. As architecture. The God who formed you in the womb knew your name before the world did. Your days are numbered by someone other than you. Suffering is not the end of meaning. It is where meaning goes to be tested.

I believed that. I still believe parts of it. It held me through things I could not have held myself through without it.

But I also believe that a woman who spent four years looking for a reason to stay had earned the right to a conversation I am not qualified to close. She waited for her dogs to die before she set a date. She chose the music. She wore his T-shirt into that room.

That is not comfortable theology. It is also not nothing.

The bill failed. It ran out of time in the House of Lords the same week Wendy died. She wouldn't have qualified anyway. The bill was written for the terminally ill. Wendy's grief didn't fit the category.

And I think that is where the argument lives now, for me at least.

The bill in its narrow form is still the right conversation to have. Terminal illness. Six months to live. Two doctors and a High Court judge required to agree. The suffering that cannot be relieved. The life that is ending regardless and is asking only for some dignity in the timing. I do not think my faith requires me to say no to that.

But Wendy's case is different. And not because her suffering was less. Because if grief this deep qualifies, and I am not saying it shouldn't, I am saying I don't know, then the line is somewhere none of us have agreed on. And the people who opposed the bill weren't wrong to worry about where it moves once it starts moving.

I held both of those things in that side street. I still hold both of them.

There are people in my church who would read this and tell me I'm wrong. That the line is clear. That life is God's to give and God's to take and the space in between is not ours to negotiate.

I understand that position. I was raised inside it. Some of what it gave me I would not give back.

But I also know that the same people who hold that position don't all hold it cleanly. Some of them support the death penalty. Life is sacred. But the state may take it as punishment. Some of them have had abortions. Life is a decision. But that decision belonged to them in that moment. These are not hypocrisies. They are the evidence of faith lived in a body, across years, through decisions that didn't wait for doctrine to catch up.

I have my own version of this. I am not going to write it here. But I know what it is. I know which positions I hold that don't resolve against each other. I know which questions I have taken to God privately that I have not raised in church.

Most people do.

Wendy carried something into that room in Basel that belongs to her and not to Parliament and not to the pulpit and not to me.

The faith she had built herself from the ruins of everything that collapsed when Marcus died. Whatever bridge she had managed to construct between what she had been given and what she had actually lived. What God meant to her by the end, if anything, and whether it was the God she started with or one she had arrived at through four years of looking for a reason to stay.

I don't know the answers to those questions. I'm not sure they're mine to know.

What I know is that I heard her story on a Tuesday evening on the way home from work and it moved something in me that hadn't moved in a while.

That is what faith is supposed to do.

Not give you answers. Press on the ones you thought you had.