In the long and unresolved debate over how a society should meet its most suffering members, the British Parliament has once again paused at the threshold. MPs voted down an assisted dying bill in England and Wales — reversing support they had twice expressed before — not because conviction had changed, but because presence had. The defeat, shaped more by absence and shifting political winds than by a turn in conscience, leaves the question where it has always lived: unanswered, urgent, and deeply human.