Death: a change of perspective
Nothing else matters
The entire metaphysical, spiritual and theological aspects aside, nothing changes perspectives quite like death. Whether it’s your own or that of a close friend or member of the family.
Last week, I wrote to a friend to ask whether he thought it was advisable to take up a pen-friendship with a Texas convict who is on death row. In his considered and considerate reply, he raised one especially interesting question. I don’t think it was intended flippantly, and I don’t think it was intended even to elicit a response, not in the particulars. He asked, “What will you talk about?”
When girl meets boy, the attraction is—dress it up how you like—sexual. If they ever progress to the level where they discuss wedlock, one, the other, or both of them should by that time be considering the question of whether they are in love; and then whether they love. Each other. Exclusively. For all time. Starts to sound a bit like a software licence.
But girl and boy will, as long as the sex act is a healthy proportion of the time they spend together, rarely linger on the matter of what they will talk about to each other. I think there’s a good chance that they will talk more to other people, in each other’s presence, than actually talk to each other.
Just for fun, read A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt and then ask yourself whether you can see yourself acting with like intensity towards your marriage partner, as in the scenes in which Thomas More challenges his wife, Alice, about swearing on the Bible concerning what she knows of her husband’s opinions on the king,1 and his need at the end that she understand why he is reconciled to being executed.2 I’m sure some couples do actually speak about matters such as these, of the heart and spirit and beyond, when they converse, but I know for a fact that many don’t.
What, then, would I talk about to a death-row convict? If I could send him a cake, I suppose it’d be helpful to conceal a file in it, but, short of that, I cannot extricate the man from his predicament. Is that a reason not to seek contact with him? What concerns me more about this what’ll-I-talk-about? issue is that Mark’s question may well have been inspired by my own viewpoint. Sort of: what do you have in common with him? Do you share certain interests? Stamp collecting, football, polishing gemstones? Maybe he did mean it another way, and I just failed to clarify, but the question is equally valid from the convict’s viewpoint. Maybe he would relish contact to someone who simply cared. And if we share no interests, then we could each tell the other about our own personal interests. “Sharing.”
I haven’t yet decided whether to embark on that, and I now have something going on in my life to put that little idea on a back-burner, for a little while. The crazy thing is that this something is something that I’ve had previous experience of and it shouldn’t be turning me topsy-turvy the way it is doing. I’ve spent a long time considering its intangible aspects and been involved first-hand in its practical aspects.
For the children of a deceased, the input required of them in terms of looking after the surviving, widowed parent, or clearing the house, arranging the funeral, contacting mourners, etc. are welcome distractions; something to do. And the whole dynamic becomes the single talking point for the closer family for several weeks. Until, that is, there arises a general feeling that that’s quite enough of that, now. We must get on with life. Get on with life. We have so much to do before that uncertain certainty of moving to the next chapter, or ending this single tome of existence, whichever is your belief structure.
Do you think your being decanted into the afterlife (sort-of old wine in a new bottle) is in any way dependent on whether you believed while alive that there is an afterlife? So that belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy? Though that’s a fat lot of good to you by the time you’d realise it. Do ouija boards spell out told you so a lot of the time?
Two reasons why I’m a bit topsy-turvy are (a) that the deceased is still alive at the moment, and (b) that, while I have distance that the family doesn’t, I lack enough of it to be dispassionate because he is a dear friend and we were very close for 20 years. Meanwhile, I also lack the proximity to the funeral arrangements, which are already in hand, for them to function as a distraction.
Much of our 20 years’ friendship was spent in laughter, but laughter’s now something neither of us feels much like doing, nor do we see any reason for it. It’s not that it’s tasteless. Nothing tasteless about laughter. It’s just pointless. In the film Kind Hearts and Coronets, Alec Guinness plays 13 members of the same family, one of which is an ailing old man on his deathbed. He nonetheless has enough wit left in him to set fire to his nurse’s newspaper, which she has opened and is sitting reading at his bedside. It’s something we might also like to do when we’re old and mischievous. But not when we know our hour is nigh.
It’s a point of trite law that you cannot defame the deceased—more precisely you cannot be sued for defamation by the deceased. All this about not speaking ill of them: in law, you can speak as ill as you want about the deceased, for there lies no action in defamation. And yet, in the weeks up until the final curtain on a life ending in terminal cancer, much activity is expended by others, at the patient’s behest, to sanitise his reputation. Odd, isn’t it?
Sanitise is the wrong word, but I can’t think of another one. My friend is gay and, if you yourself are straight, you will never have been confronted by the huge, strangely-shaped creature that occupies a large portion of our lives with us, there, in the room. If you’re straight, it might never, and, if it did, then only fleetingly, have entered your mind to consider how obvious it is that you’re straight. What tell-tale signs there could be, that people might suspect you’re straight. Whisper behind your back, “Do you think he’s, you know, one of them … straight? A friend of … what’s the expression? … of the Marmadukes at no. 24?” Maybe you’re lonely and want an opposite-sex-friend: do you hang around the park at midnight, advertise in the classifieds, or sign up to a dating website? Whatever, make sure your neighbours don’t twitch their net curtains, at all costs.
Of course, straight folk don’t have these thoughts (or have them fleetingly). But we gays have these thoughts all the time. Our entire lives long. In my case, from age seven to now. Homosexuality is the elephant in our room, our entire lives long and it is never such an encumbrance in that room as when you’re single and the room is the place you’re dying in. Ha! And we get called woke. Maybe when straight people consider the boot on the other foot, they will awaken, too. Anyhow, now I am busy sanitising my friend’s home so that his family will not be confronted by the accoutrements he had assembled for his amusement in terms of his predilection. Much of it will end up at my place. His fetishes were for the most part the same as mine. I have fetishes. Do you?
A fetish is when a notion, idea, or the touch of certain clothing or its image conjures within you a chemical, hormonal rush of excitement, which you cannot yourself control, and can have the effect of engorging certain primary sexual characteristics. That’s a fetish. And if you don’t have any fetishes, then you have my sincere sympathies. Try an evening leafing through PornHub and see what is on offer that … tickles your fancy. You may yet discover your fetish, just note what you’re doing when you get the engorged rush of excitement. It worked for me.
My friend is gay and he had to fight to establish his rights and his independence and how his relationship would be with his family—for the most part under sufferance, but enveloped in true, well-meant love, although he had to keep his disclosures down to the limit set by the TMI standard: too much information.
Really, if someone wants to open their heart to you, you should never say those three words. That is an affront, whose sting can only be imagined by him or her who says it. Now, at the conclusion of his life, what my friend ushered into his boudoir by dint of who he was needs to be expunged, by dint of who his family are. I suppose it’s the same process, sort of, as decolonisation, but in reverse. Apart from the bitter taste in my mouth, at least.
Here’s what I wrote to another buddy about what I’m feeling right now. Because it ultimately comes down to that question that Mark asked: what do we talk about? And I really don’t know, because my inability to alter a death-row convict’s predicament is every bit as complete as my inability to alter that of a terminal cancer-sufferer.
On Monday, which was when I learned that he had so little time left in this world, I immediately drove to him. When I arrived, I gently knocked and opened the door to his hospital room. The room is in shade, curtains drawn. He has a swing-over table, with his computer and his phone. The computer is not used, though. No radio. No television. It’s subdued and calm. Gé’s arm is spotted with places where the staff have set catheters and he has one now, but he’s remarkably au fait with it and can get up to go to the bathroom with no problem.
I didn’t know what to say. To him. We can chat nineteen to the dozen, but I had no idea what to say. Except how sorry I was; and then I just blubbed. Every last thing that I would normally have uttered when meeting a friend went through an instantaneous mental process, on the spot: a thought of what to say, prepare to say it, then chuck it in the toilet—rejection on grounds of futility, rejection for being facile, rejection for being funny, and it’s not funny. It’s simply not funny. We hugged and we kissed.
The nursing staff came in to enquire where he was with his medicines. He’s an expert now and told them not to administer one of them—it makes him nauseous. Whatever a predicament it is that he’s in, he’s an active participant in his treatment. At one point he sent me with his keys to his home to arrange some things for him. I was glad I could be of service. He asked me to bring some things to Belgium and, by the time I got back to the ward, it was gone half eight, so I quickly put his keys in his locker and then I didn’t know what to say again.
“Have a nice week”? “Chin up!”? “See you …
… soon”?
When you know your death is imminent, there is no such thing as small talk. Small talk simply becomes what it always was: irrelevant. The sole thing that preoccupies patient and friend alike is the patient’s imminent death. So, we talked about Gé’s death. People do the dying no favours by avoiding the subject of death. It’s what the dying are living for.
He’d like to be buried but he knows his mother would like him cremated, so he’ll go with that if it pleases his mother. Talk about “obliging to the last.” He’s busy with telling people what things in the house they can take. I asked about his plants and he said, “Chuck them away.” He’s a qualified florist and loves flowers. And now, they’re irrelevant as well. I’d like to bring a few to my home, but he has a lot. A few, perhaps.
I said I’d be back at the weekend, and I’ll go up Friday, and come back home the same day. I wanted to write to him with my plans, but the word plans now sounds so brutal. Like saying, “Don’t you see?” to a blind person.
Arrangements, then; with his brother. But no plans. Everything is now on the hoof. Death is like parenting. There is little in the way of formal preparation, it’s often done in a bit of a rush, we hope that we’re getting it right, and there will be those critical if we get it wrong. We mostly trust we’ll do it properly, even if there are no qualifications for dying. Unlike parenting, there’s no minimum age, either.
Death, whether your own or someone else’s is a change of perspective. How much of one is a matter for you. My perspective is coloured by my scripture master at school, who had a lazy drawl, hailing as he did from Hampshire. He was a lay Methodist preacher and a strict disciplinarian of the old school. But his heart could not have been fuller of love. And he told us, “Now, my boys, when I die and ascend to heaven to be with my Lord, I forbid you categorically to weep. I want no crying and sobbing (he knew he’d not be getting too much from us 14-year-olds). You are not to cry, for dying and joining with Jesus is the most wonderful thing. Instead, have a party and celebrate it.”
Death is a change of perspective. It’s a change of state and, who knows, never say never, it may just be a change of mind for you when it does come. All of that I knew, but didn’t appreciate. Everything now is so obvious and so rational, because laughter and irony and joking and playing the fool are now all gone. Till we get to the point where I have to get on with life.
That’s the perspective that death changes: clarity. Nothing else matters.
ALICE: Poor silly man, d’you think they’ll leave you here to learn to fish?
MORE (straight at her): If we govern our tongues they will! … Look, I have a word to say about that. I have made no statement. I’ve resigned, that’s all. On the King’s Supremacy, the King’s divorce, which he’ll now grant himself, the marriage he’ll then make—have you heard me make a statement?
ALICE: No—and if I’m to lose my rank and fall to housekeeping I want to know the reason; so make a statement now.
MORE: No—(ALICE exhibits indignation)—Alice, it’s a point of law! Accept it from me, Alice, that in silence is my safety under the law, but my silence must be absolute, it must extend to you.
ALICE: In short you don’t trust us!
MORE (impatient): Look—(advances on her) I’m the Lord Chief Justice, I’m Cromwell, I’m the King’s Head Jailer—and I take your hand (does so) and I clamp it on the Bible, on the Blessed Cross (clamps her hand on his closed fist) and I say: ‘Woman, has your husband made a statement on these matters?’ Now—on peril of your soul remember—what’s your answer?
ALICE: No.
MORE: And so it must remain.
MORE (he is in great fear of her): I am faint when I think of the worst that they may do to me. But worse than that would be to go, with you not understanding why I go.
ALICE: I don’t!
MORE (just hanging on to his self-possession): Alice, if you can tell me that you understand, I think I can make a good death, if I have to.
ALICE: Your death’s no ‘good’ to me!
MORE: Alice, you must tell me that you understand!
ALICE: I don’t (She throws it straight at his head) I don’t believe this had to happen.
MORE (his face is drawn): If you say that, Alice, I don’t see how I’m to face it.
ALICE: It’s the truth!
MORE (gasping) You’re an honest woman.
ALICE: Much good it may do me! I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of; that when you’ve gone, I shall hate you for it.
MORE (turns from her; his face working): Well, you mustn’t, Alice, that’s all. (Swiftly she crosses the stage to him; he turns and they clasp each other fiercely): You mustn’t, you—
ALICE (covers his mouth with her hand): S-s-sh … As for understanding, I understand you’re the best man that I ever met or am likely to; and if you go—well God knows why I suppose—though as God’s my witness God’s kept deadly quiet about it! And, if anyone wants my opinion of the King and his Council they’ve only to ask for it.
MORE: Why, it’s a lion I married! A lion! A lion!