Flaubert said: “Everything must be learned, from reading to dying.” But we don’t get much practice at the latter. We have also become more sceptical about exemplary deaths of the kind Montaigne enumerated: scenes in which dignity, courage, and concern for others are displayed, consoling last words uttered, and the sombre action unfolds without farcical interruption. Daudet, for instance, died at his own dinner table, surrounded by his family. He took a few spoonfuls of soup, and was chatting away happily about the play he was working on, when the death rattle was heard and he fell back in his chair. That was the official version, and it sounds close to his friend Zola’s definition of une belle mort—to be crushed suddenly, like an insect beneath a giant finger. And it is true as far as it goes. But the obituarists did not record what happened immediately afterwards. Two doctors had been summoned, and for an hour and a half—an hour and a half—they attempted artificial respiration by the then fashionable method of rhythmical traction of the tongue. When this unsurprisingly failed to work, they switched, with no greater success, to a primitive form of electrical defibrillation.
I suppose there is some rough professional irony here—the langue being what made Daudet’s name, and the langue being what the doctors yanked on when attempting to save him. Perhaps he might (just) have appreciated it. I suppose that up to the moment he died, it was a good death—apart from having been preceded by the torments of tertiary syphilis, of course. George Sand died simply, lucidly, encouragingly, in the pastoral peace of her house at Nohant, while looking out over trees she had planted herself many years previously. That was a good death, too—apart from its being preceded by the pain of incurable cancer. I am more inclined to believe in the good death of Georges Braque, mainly because it sounds as his art looks (though this might be a sentimentalism). His dying was characterized by “a calm achieved through self-mastery rather than apathy.” Towards the end, as he was slipping in and out of consciousness, he called for his palette; and he died “without suffering, calmly, his gaze fixed until the last moment on the trees in his garden, the highest branches of which were visible from the great windows of his studio.”
I do not expect such luck, or such calmness. Looking out at trees you have planted yourself? I have only planted a fig and a gooseberry bush, neither of which is visible from the bedroom window. Calling for your palette? I trust that I shall be disobeyed if, in my last moments, I ask for my electric typewriter, an IBM 196c of such weight that I doubt my wife could lift it. I imagine I shall die rather as my father did, in hospital, in the middle of the night. I expect that a nurse or doctor will say that I just “slipped away,” and that someone was with me at the end, whether or not this will have been the case. I expect my departure to have been preceded by severe pain, fear, and exasperation at the imprecise or euphemistic use of language around me. I hope that whoever is offered the binliner of my clothes does not discover in it a pair of unworn, brown, Velcro-fastened slippers. Perhaps my trousers will inhabit some park bench or grim hostel for a season or two after my death.
I find this in my diary, written twenty and more years ago:
People say of death, “There’s nothing to be frightened of.” They say it quickly, casually. Now let’s say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. “There’s NOTHING to be frightened of.” Jules Renard: “The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word ‘nothing.’”
Chapter 29
When we let the mind roam to the circumstances of our own death, there is usually a magnetic pull towards the worst case or the best case. My worst imaginings usually involve enclosure, water, and a period of time in which to endure the certainty of coming extinction. There is, for instance, the overturned-ferry scenario: the air pocket, darkness, slowly rising water, screaming fellow mortals, and the competition for breath. Then there is the solitary version of this: bundled into the boot of a car (perhaps your own) while your captors drive from one cashpoint to another, and then, when your credit card is finally refused, the giddying lurch from river bank or sea cliff, the splash, and the greedy glug of water coming for you. Or the analogous, if more improbable, wildlife version of this: being taken by a crocodile, dragged under water, losing consciousness, and then regaining it on a shelf above the waterline in the croc’s lair, and realizing that you have just become the waiting contents of the beast’s larder. (And such things happen, in case you doubt.)
The best case, in my fantasizing, used to turn on a medical diagnosis which left me just enough time, and just enough lucidity, in which to write that last book—the one which would contain all my thoughts about death. Although I didn’t know if it was going to be fiction or nonfiction, I had the first line planned and noted many years ago: “Let’s get this death thing straight.” But what kind of doctor is going to give you the diagnosis that suits your literary requirements? “I’m afraid there’s good news and bad news.” “Tell me straight, Doc, I need to know. How long?” “How long? I’d say about 200 pages, 250 if you’re lucky, or work fast.”
No, it isn’t going to happen like that, so it’s best to get the book done before the diagnosis. Of course, there is a third possibility (which I have been entertaining since page one): you start the book, you are nearly halfway through—just about here, for instance—and then you get the diagnosis! Maybe the narrative is flagging a bit by this stage, so enter the chest pain, the fainting fit, the X-rays, the CAT scan . . . Would that, I wonder, look a little contrived? (The readers’ group confers. “Oh, I always thought he was going to die at the end—well, after the end, didn’t you?” “No, I thought he might be bluffing. I wasn’t sure he was even ill. I thought it might be, what do you call it, metafiction?”)
It probably isn’t going to happen this way either. When we imagine our own dying, whether best or worst case, we tend to imagine dying lucidly, dying while aware (all too aware) of what is going on, able to express ourselves and understand others. How successfully can we imagine dying—and the long lead-up to the event itself—in a state of incoherence and misunderstanding? With the same original pain and fear, of course, but now with an added layer of confusion. Not knowing quite who anybody is, not knowing who is alive or dead, not knowing where you are. (But just as shit-scared anyway.) I remember visiting an elderly and demented friend in hospital. She would turn to me, and in her soft, rather genteel voice which I had once much loved, would say things like, “I do think you will be remembered as one of the worst criminals in history.” Then a nurse might walk past, and her mood change swiftly. “Of course,” she would assure me, “the maids here are frightfully good.” Sometimes I would let such remarks pass (for her sake, for my sake), sometimes (for her sake, for my sake) correct them. “Actually, they’re nurses.” My friend would give a cunning look expressing surprise at my naivety. “Some of them are,” she conceded. “But most of them are maids.”
My father had a series of strokes which reduced him, over the years, from an erect man of my height, first to a figure hunched over a Zimmer, his head cocked in that awkward angled lift the frame compels, and then to the half-humiliated occupant of a wheelchair. When the social services came to assess his level of incapacity, they explained that he would need, and they would pay for, a handrail to help him from bed to door. My mother overrode the suggestion: “Not having that ugly thing in the room.” She maintained that it would spoil the bungalow’s decor; but her refusal was, I now suspect, an oblique way of denying what had happened—and what might await her too. One thing she did allow—to my surprise—was an alteration to Dad’s armchair. This was the sturdy green high-backed Parker Knoll in which Grandpa used to read his Daily Express, and mistake Grandma’s stomach for the telephone. Now, its legs were extended with metal sheaths, so that Dad could get in and out more easily.
This slow physical crumbling was paralleled by an erosion of my father’s speech: of his articulation, and memory for words. (He had been a French teacher, and now his langue was going.) I see again the shuffle-and-push of his slow Zi
mmer progress from lounge to front door when he came to see me off: a stretch of time which felt endless, and where every conversational topic sounded utterly false. I would pretend to linger, look searchingly at a jug of flowers on the sideboard, or pause to observe again some knick-knack I had always disliked. Eventually, the three of us would make it to the front mat. On one occasion, my father’s farewell words were, “And next time, bring . . . bring . . .” Then he got stuck. I didn’t know whether to wait, or, with a pretence of understanding, nod agreeingly. But my mother said firmly, “Bring who?”—as if my father’s mental fallibility were something correctible by the right sort of questioning. “Bring . . . bring . . .” His expression was now one of furious frustration at his own brain. “Bring who?” my mother repeated. By now the answer was so obvious and unnecessary that I wanted to run out of the door, jump in the car, and drive away. Suddenly, Dad found a way round his aphasia. “Bring . . . Julian’s wife.” Ah, relief. But not quite. My mother, to my ear not sounding all that sympathetic, said, “Oh, you mean P.”—thus turning my schoolmaster father into some test-failing schoolboy.
He would stand at the front door, crouched over his frame with its stupid, empty metal basket clipped to the handlebars; his head would be tilted, as if he were trying to prevent the action of gravity on his lower jaw. I would say goodbye and set off the dozen yards or so to my car, whereupon—inevitably—my mother would “remember” something, come at a trot down the little curve of tarmac (her hurried gait emphasizing my father’s immobility), and tap on the window. I would lower it reluctantly, guessing what she was going to say. “What do you think? He’s deteriorated, hasn’t he?” I would look past my mother to my father, who knew we were talking about him, and knew that I knew that he knew. “No,” I would usually reply, out of loyalty to Dad, because the only alternative would have been to bellow, “He’s had a fucking stroke, Ma, what do you expect—volleyball?” But she would judge my diplomatic reply proof of inattention, and as I slowly let out the clutch and inched my way down the tarmac, would hold on to the window and give examples of the deterioration I had failed to observe.
I do not mean that she was unkind to him; but her way of dealing with my father’s condition was to stress her own inconvenience and suffering, while implying that his suffering was a little more his own fault than people realized. “Of course, when he falls down, he panics,” she would complain. “Well, I can’t lift him, so I have to get someone from the village to help. But he panics because he can’t get up.” Black mark. Then there was the matter of my father’s pedalling machine, which the hospital physiotherapist had provided. He was supposed to sit in his Parker Knoll and pump away at this shiny little bicycle remnant. Whether mock-cycling in an armchair struck my father as absurd, or whether he simply decided that it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to his condition, I don’t know. “He’s so stub-born,” my mother would complain.
Of course, when it came to her turn, she was just as stubborn. Her initial stroke was far more immobilizing than Dad’s first one: she was largely paralysed down her right side, and her speech was more damaged than his. She showed herself most coherent when in greatest rage at what had happened. With her good hand she would reach across and pick up her stricken arm. “And of course,” she said, sounding for a moment exactly like her old self, “this thing’s completely useless.” This thing had let her down, rather as my father had. And then, exactly like Dad, she treated the physiotherapists with scepticism. “They’re pushing and pulling at me,” she would complain. When I told her they were pushing and pulling at her to help her recover, she replied, satirically, “Yes, sir.” Yet she was admirably unflinching, and dismissive of what she saw as false morale-boosting. “They tell you to do something, and then they say, ‘Very good.’ It’s so stupid, I know it isn’t very good.” So she stopped cooperating. Her way of remaining herself was to mock professional optimism and decline the hypothetical recovery.
My niece C. went to visit her. I called to ask how it had gone, and how Ma was. “Completely bonkers when I got there, but once we started talking about make-up, completely sane.” Suspecting the harshness of youth in my niece’s assessment, I asked—perhaps a little stiffly—what form being “bonkers” had taken. “Oh, she was very angry with you. She said you’d stood her up three days running for tennis, and left her there on court.” OK, bonkers.
Not that my niece escaped censure. On one occasion she and I sat through twenty mysterious minutes of furious silence and stubborn avoidance of eye contact. Eventually, Ma turned to C. and said, “You’re a proper monkey, you are. But you do understand why I had to tear a strip off you, don’t you?” Perhaps such dishing-out of fantastical blame gave her the illusion of control over her life. Blame which extended also to my brother, whose absence in France did not excuse or protect him. About two weeks after her first stroke, with her speech largely incomprehensible, we were discussing—or rather, I was telling her—how I would manage things while she was in hospital. I listed the people I could consult, adding that if there was any problem, I could always fall back on my brother’s “fine brain.” With struggling pauses between each word, our mother succeeded in putting together the flawless sentence: “His fine brain doesn’t think about anything but work.”
Despite months of stubborn noncooperation in hospital, she recovered some of her speech, though none of her movement. Not being one to fool herself, she announced that she was incapable of returning to live in her bungalow. A staff nurse called Sally came to assess her ability to function in the nursing home C. and I were hoping to get her into. Ma claimed to have already inspected the place and found it “pukka”; though I suspect that her “visit” had been fabulated from reading a brochure. She told Staff Nurse Sally that she had decided to take her meals alone in her room: she couldn’t eat with the other residents because she lacked the use of her right arm. “Oh, don’t be silly,” said the nurse. “It doesn’t matter.” My mother’s reply was commanding: “When I say it matters, it matters.” “Have you ever been a teacher?” was Sally’s canny riposte.
Chapter 30
As a young man, I was terrified of flying. The book I would choose to read on a plane would be something I felt appropriate to have found on my corpse. I remember taking Bouvard et Pécuchet on a flight from Paris to London, deluding myself that after the inevitable crash a) there would be an identifiable body on which it might be found; b) that Flaubert in French paperback would survive impact and flames; c) that when recovered, it would still be grasped in my miraculously surviving (if perhaps severed) hand, a stiffened forefinger bookmarking a particularly admired passage, of which posterity would therefore take note. A likely story—and I was naturally too scared during the flight to concentrate on a novel whose ironic truths in any case tend to be withheld from younger readers.
I was largely cured of my fear at Athens airport. I was in my mid-twenties, and had arrived in good time for my flight home—such good time (so eager to leave) that instead of being several hours early, I was a whole day and several hours early. My ticket could not be changed; I had no money to go back into the city and find a hotel; so I camped out at the airport. Again, I can remember the book—the crash companion—I had with me: a volume of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. To kill time, I went up on to the viewing roof of the terminal building. From there, I watched plane after plane take off, plane after plane land. Some of them probably belonged to dodgy airlines and were crewed by drunks; but none of them crashed. I watched scores of planes not crash. And this visual, rather than statistical, demonstration of the safety of flying convinced me.
Could I try this trick again? If I looked on death more closely and more frequently—took a job as an undertaker’s assistant or mortuary clerk—might I again, by the evidence of familiarity, lose my fear? Possibly. But there ’s a fallacy here, which my brother, as a philosopher, would quickly point out. (Although he would probably delete that descriptive phrase. When I showed him the opening pages of this bo
ok, he declined my assumption that it was “as a philosopher” that he distrusted memory. “Is it ‘as a philosopher’ that I think all that? No more than it is ‘as a philosopher’ that I think no second-hand car salesmen are reliable.” Perhaps; though even his denial sounds to me like a philosopher’s denial.) The fallacy is this: at Athens airport, I was watching thousands and thousands of passengers not die. At an undertaker’s or mortuary, I would be confirming my worst suspicion: that the death rate for the human race is not a jot lower than one hundred per cent.
Chapter 31