Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author Book

10/10

Julian Barnes is nothing if not ironic for while he boldly states, or calmly reassures us that there is nothing to be frightened of, there's a lot that he fears for himself ...

As one who wouldn't mind dying as long as I didn't end up dead afterwards, I can certainly make a start on elaborating what my fears about dying might be. I fear being my father as he sat in a chair by his hospital bed and with quite uncharacteristic irateness rebuked me - 'You said you were coming yesterday' - before working out from my embarrassment that it was he who had got things confused. I fear being my mother imagining that she still played tennis. I fear being the friend who, longing for death, would repeatedly confide that he had managed to acquire and swallow enough pills to kill himself, but was now seethingly anxious that his actions might get a nurse into trouble. I fear being the innately courteous literary man I knew who, as senility took hold, began spouting at his wife the most extreme sexual fantasies, as if they were what he had always secretly wanted to do to her.

I fear being the octogenarian Somerset Maugham, dropping his trousers behind the sofa and shitting on the rug (even if the moment might happily recall my childhood). I fear being the elderly friend, a man of both refinement and squeamishness, whose eyes showed animal panic when the nurse in the residential home announced in front of visitors that it was time to change his nappy. I fear the nervous laugh I shall give when I don't quite get an allusion or have forgotten a shared memory, or a familiar face, and then begin to mistrust much of what I think I know, and finally mistrust all of it. I fear the catheter and the stairlift, the oozing body and the wasting brain. I fear the Chabrier/Ravel fate of not knowing who I have been and what I have made. Perhaps Stravinsky, in extreme old age, had their endings in mind when he used to call out from his room for his wife or a member of the household. 'What is it you need?' they would ask. ' To be reassured of my own existence,' he would reply. And the confirmation might come in the form of a handclasp, a kiss, or the playing of a favourite record.

And in the telling, we find the revelation: we fear not so much death, but death in life. We fear the loss of self -- the seemingly small death -- before the bigger sleep. But really, it's the reverse: we die in a bigger, more tangible way when we lose ourselves in illness, mental or physical than when the body just simply gives up its ghost. We die with far more cruelty when we are still alive but cannot communicate with those we love.

I've watched this several times in my life; and one quite recently in the last year, where everything came dangerously close to the big sleep, and then miraculously pulled back again. Was it a miracle? Was it science? Was it the will to live? Was it nothing at all but a roll of the dice?

What have I learned? I've learned that Death really is nothing to be afraid of. But the loss of dignity is devastating: it excoriates the spirit and it would be better to be flayed alive than to succumb and submit to all the indignities over which one has no control: how the body oozes and whimpers and hemorrhages and leeches and sheds and exudes and seeps and excretes and weeps, weeps, weeps uncontrollably. And over this, we have no control. And over this, we have to submit to our loved one's gaze; we have to offer this up to them, as our last gift. How can the person that is dying NOT feel shamed and humiliated? The last gesture that we offer those we love is one of weakness of mind and foulness of body.

No, death comes with a sense of great relief, great privilege, at the end of all this. To close our eyes, and not see anymore of this -- like the child playing peek-a-boo who hides her eyes behind her little hands, thinking as she does so that she can no longer be seen. This is the dignity we long for, when we die, are dying.

We don't want pats on the hand, in our humiliation, to hear someone say, "There, it's alright. Take my hand." I think it would be far more kind to turn away, and say, "I don't see it. I don't see you in this way that you are now. I only see you with the sun in your hair and the green fields behind you." It is far sweeter to turn away and say, "I don't see you as a broken and worn body. I see you as prince of the apple towns ... honoured among foxes and pheasants ... under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long, under this sun that is born over and over..."

Thank you to Julian Barnes for having this very important conversation with me!