I’m a young 63-year-old corporate designer, very recently diagnosed with stomach cancer + secondaries. It’s not curable, and I’m just coming to terms with the fact. Some protective device has kicked in which seems to keep me a little detached, and one of the things I want to do is to write a book – and I’ve started. The book is entitled “Closing Remarks” and it will be accompanied by a short anthology of poetry, some of it linked to the book, but not all.
The book itself will discuss all the aspects of my situation, relating them to my beliefs (many of which will evolve during the writing!), my experiences and indeed those of others, including any who care to respond to this blog.
The blog is all about coming to an end, but also about “being” and “having been”. I’m not a psychic and have no claims to special powers, no patience with mysticism, and no real interest in cults, specific religions or supernatural phenomena. Or snake oil. However, I am open-minded, and, as a seeker after truth, welcome helpful comments that may extend my horizons or assist in the formulation of whatever will emerge.
I have never blogged before and I’m really interested in the process. Excerpts from my book, as they form part of this blog, are of course my copyright, to be published only with prior permission; in the same way I will treat any input from others as their copyright unless they say specifically that it may be included, with a “credit” to them.
Next is the prologue to the book – hope it gets someone going…
Prologue
I have never considered myself to be an expert on the subject of dying. Like most people, the very thought, shrouded as it is in taboo and armoured within the paraphernalia of self-deceit, has been a million miles away from most of my waking moments, and consciously so. After all, who in their right mind wishes to dwell on the consideration of life after we’ve gone? If we’re not here to enjoy it, it’s almost an insult, quite unbearable to think of all those folk having fun when we cannot.
And so, now confronted by certain death (actually we all are, always, but we ignore the fact until we’re forced to admit we’re not immortal) and probably with a reasonably short fuse to accompany the short straw, I find myself in danger of being obsessed by the rotten subject, or at the very least rather absorbed by its implications.
Fact is, over the years it does occasionally come up – at funerals and wakes, dinner parties, theological debates, and so on.
Paradoxically, our daily news and entertainment are suffused by death in all its forms, with the emphasis on violence. Most newscasts carry stories of murder and tragedy. Children’s computer games are geared toward “hack’n’slash” skills. Sports are littered with expressions like “sudden death”; books about serial killers, zombies and ghouls abound in our libraries, and even the most innocent cartoon movies get laughs from actions which, in real life, would be painful, deadly and unbelievably tragic.
Of course, this in itself is one of the keys. Death is softened or disguised on the television news. We in the United Kingdom just don’t see the shards of flesh, gaping wounds or dismembered bodies which mark the aftermath of a bomb or a plane crash. These things are hinted at, but somehow it just won’t do to show the detail, the minutiae of mortality. Bloodstains are sinister, but acceptable. Bandaged wounds are permissible. Death? The reality of it? Whoa, wait a minute! Just who do you think you’re kidding…?
And so it goes on. Imaginary dying fills our novels, movies, songs and games. Heroic deaths reinforce our literature. But the real thing? If you’ve ever been in a hospital ward where someone has lost their life, you’ll know that a curtain will hide the departed one’s form until, usually in the dead of night (useful expression here), some faceless people will quietly divest the room of the offending object, together with its memories, so that none have their sensibilities challenged.
When I was young I always wondered why cowboys in Roy Rogers movies, on being shot by a .45 calibre revolver, would clap a hand to their chests (no sign of blood) and appear to swoon, which meant that they were dead. A bullet of that size and power does in fact hit its human target like a spear with terrible force, driving back its victim as if hit by a car. It often travels around the body causing massive tissue damage before exiting, driving bone and muscle out of an enormous exit wound. But this we don’t see, because death would be too real, too close, too horrible.
Then again, the individual on the receiving end of that terrifying missile is actually no more and no less dead than the elderly lady who “passes away” peacefully in her sleep. For both parties, they are “out of it”, feeling no pain, thinking no thoughts (or are they?), having no worries.
It seems to be that in most forms of civilised society, to a greater or lesser degree, we need to be somehow insulated from what is obviously the most natural thing in the world – certainly as natural as birth, and absolutely inevitable for all living things.
We are routinely shielded from the detail of death, why? Is it because the knowledge would madden us? Is it because we could not tolerate life after seeing such things? The ambulance driver sees these terrible sights most days, and has to deal with them. His insulation is usually a rather ghoulish sense of humour, because only laughter prevents him from becoming totally desensitized, callous and inhuman.
One of the stranger aspects of this unrealistic stance is that, sooner or later, we will all confront the reality of death. Since this is so, why on earth do we carefully arrange its manifestation precisely so that we are totally unprepared?
On an earlier page I admitted that I have recently joined the ranks of the “walking dead”, that is to say those eerie people who have a signed warrant for their “execution” but don’t know quite when the sentence will be carried out. Many might surmise that a good question for the physician is “How long have I got?” In my case, I’d rather not be bound by someone’s (albeit educated) guess. I’d prefer to fight the event on my terms and figure I’ll last a bit longer that way.
In the act of preparing myself – and I make no bones about the fact that I see all of us carrying a hidden mindset which will emerge to protect us when the time comes – I have attempted to rationalise my approach to my own demise. The following pages contain a collection of thoughts which may seem at times disjointed, unscientific or maybe downright irrelevant, but they are my thoughts, laced with the intensity of realism, the (perhaps sardonic) humour of the condemned man and a genuine desire to illuminate what is perhaps one of the least approachable subjects known to us.
Read this offering with a sense of fun. Experiment with your own views and debate the issue with friends at dinner parties. If you’re young the subject will be more or less a diversion. However, if you’re “getting on a bit”, developing your own version of events may prove to offer catharsis, illumination and a degree of self-realisation to assist you on your final journey in this life, whenever it should begin…
