On Mortality

I have entered a twilight zone: friends are departing life, with courage and dignity. We are all passing into the darkness, where death is approaching. The manner of our own passing will take time for us to understand our own journey towards our end. Some of us have indications, a product of our vulnerability and incapacities. For others it happens almost without warning, and for others its a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, whether a plane crash or a traffic accident.

This is somewhat dour and grim. But those like me of a certain age, in my case over 80, know that death is approaching, our infirmities and vulnerabilities serving as a guidepost. My disability of Myasthenia Gravis certainly is an impediment. I trudge on, sometimes a bit depressed, but usually quite cheerfully! I don't take my own departure too seriously!

For some, it has taken them by surprise- cruel, undeserved, and a question that echoes, 'Why me?'

For others, they find courage and dignity they did not know they possessed.

There are no exceptions; to be born means dying in due course. Life is a one-way ticket. A writer I admire enormously is Christopher Hitchens. He wrote prolifically for a host of journals, including the New Statesman and Vanity Fair.

He was an atheist all his life, and ferociously anti-Christian, thinking it a load of hypocritical self-justifying bunkum. In the last months of his life, he wrote an extraordinary memoir of his own approaching death from throat cancer called Mortality. It's necessarily brief since his illness didn't give him much time, but he wrote about his own death with the journalistic eloquence of one of his articles. He writes with elegance. and sardonic wit as becomes one of the leading writers of his generation. This is how he looked when as he would put it, he was well ensconced in the departure lounge.

Two short extracts suffice. In chapter 1 he writes: 'I have more than once in my life woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June 2009, when I woke up feeling as if I was actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. Any movement however slight required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York Hotel and summon the emergency services...'

In chapter V he quote's Eliot's Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:

'I have seen the moments of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker. An in short, I was afraid.'

Hitchens writes: 'Like so many of life's varieties of experiences, the diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite accustomed to the spector of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping to have a word. ..On a much too regular basis, the disease serves me up with a teasing special of the day. It might be random sores and ulcers on the tongue or in the mouth. Or why not a touch of peripheral neuropathy like numb and chilly feet?' The symptoms he records with such dispassionate rigour inevitably get worse, until just two days before his death, he literally, physically cannot write any more.

Coming from a Christian society and being a practising Christian, the Christian rituals for the departed are the ones I am most familiar with, follow, and hope to be true.

Or in a more satirical vein, there is Pieter Bruegel's portrayal.

Nobody knows for sure what lies on the other side if anything at all. Those who have gone before us know, or perhaps there is nothingness, a void, existence snuffed out, extinguished. We hope but do not know if there is eternal justice, good works being rewarded, evil deeds punished.

Our folktales, legends, and myths are much concerned with this. In Greek mythology, Charon ferries the departed across the River Styx.

The virtuous will go on to the Elysian Fields and enjoy heavenly delights, whilst the damned will burn eternally in the fires of Hades

Orpheus went down to the underworld to seek and pull back from death his beloved Eurydice.

All we know for sure as individuals is that our life continues until it stops.

However, in many societies, people have no particular religion or faith at all. We are simply agnostics or atheists or nothing at all. Harold Bloom speaks for this majority with particular eloquence about this in his valedictory masterpiece Possessed by Memory (1992), completed just a few weeks before he himself passed on: “Epicurus wrote to Menoceus ‘So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not concern either the living or the dead, since for the former, it is not, and the latter is no more’.

“That does not abate my sorrow for the beloved dead or requite my loneliness for my many departed friends, yet it holds off and fears about my own vanishing.”

For me, the person who has written about it most powerfully, from an atheist perspective, is Christopher Hitchens, who died a few months after dying of throat cancer.

For me, this is my agony and deep distress. I cannot bear it, for them, my friends, the pain or distress some will find, or for others, the peace, resignation, and dignity they will discover. Since I am still here, to write and reflect, I have not yet, as Bloom puts it, vanished, but I will. For some of my friends, the vanishing time is upon them or has eaten them up.

Bloom quotes from many sources, including, surprisingly perhaps, the Book of Ecclesiastes, which was probably written by King Solomon: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit does a man have from all his labour, in which he toils under the sun? One generation passes away, and another generation comes. But the earth abides forever. The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and it hastens to the place where it arose. The wind goes towards the south, and turns around towards the north; the wind whirls about continually, and comes again upon its circuit….To the place towards which the rivers come, there they return again….That which has been, is what will be. That which has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. ..There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come by those who come after.” (New King James translation)

In Ecclesiastes, King Solomon expresses unflinchingly the bitter truths of life on earth. The world-weary question arises: what was it all worth, what was it about? If we do have the great good fortune to live to an advanced old age, health relatively intact, death when it arrives may be a release, a welcome return to the abyss of nothingness., or whatever does exist on the other side. When faced with this ultimate challenge of existence, the return to non-existence, Ecclesiastes is a surprisingly cynical book to find in the Old Testament, but refreshingly honest for all that. Ecclesiastes is profoundly pessimistic and pronounces (ch 4): “So I returned and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such who were oppressed, and they had no comforter: and on the side of their oppressors, there was power, but they had no comforter. Wherefore I praised the dead who are already dead more than the living who are yet alive. Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work which is done under the sun.” The book concludes, perhaps because there is no other recourse: “Fear God and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil. “

The fact that a dear friend of mine has recently died brings this home to me very acutely. He has passed through the boundary that separates the living from the dead. Where is he now? Has he just vanished? No, not at all. The good that people do, that he did, lasts beyond the grave. And he did achieve much of great benefit in his life, not only for himself and his family but for the community of people, the sufferers and disenfranchised, for whom he most cared was a great deal of benefit not just for them individually, but for the systems of care and service he did so much to improve. There is so much to be proud of and celebrate in his life.

What all funerals have in common, at least the ones I have attended, is that they celebrate the departed and their interests, passions, commitments and achievements. This was the case for his funeral. My friend has not vanished from the memories of friends and family; his many achievements live on after him.