Dying (5 page)

No, it would not be breaking the law to go out on my own. The newspapers are full
of options: hanging, falling from a great height, leaping in front of a speeding
train, drowning, blowing myself up, setting myself on fire, but none of them really
appeals to me. Again I'm constrained by the thought of collateral damage, of the
shock to my family, of the trauma to whoever was charged with putting out the flames,
fishing out the body, scraping the brains off the pavement. When you analyse all
the possible scenarios for suicide, none of them is pretty. Which is the reason I
support the arguments in favour of assisted dying, because, to misquote Churchill,
it is the worst method of dying, except for all the others.

No, I haven't become religious; that is, I haven't experienced a late conversion
to a particular faith. If that means I'm going straight to hell when I die then so
be it. One of my problems with religion has always been the idea that the righteous
are saved and the rest are condemned. Isn't that the ultimate logic of religion's
‘us' and ‘them' paradigm?

Perhaps it's a case of not missing what you have never had. I had no religious instruction
growing up. I knew a
few Bible stories from a brief period of attendance at Sunday
school, but these seemed on a level with fairy tales, if less interesting. Their
sanctimoniousness put me off. I preferred the darker tones of the Brothers Grimm,
who presented a world where there was no redemption, where bad things happened for
no reason, and nobody was punished. Even now I prefer that view of reality. I don't
think God has a plan for us. I think we're a species with godlike pretensions but
an animal nature, and that, of all of the animals that have ever walked the earth,
we are by far the most dangerous.

Cancer strikes at random. If you don't die of cancer you die of something else, because
death is a law of nature. The survival of the species relies on constant renewal,
each generation making way for the next, not with any improvement in mind, but in
the interests of plain endurance. If that is what eternal life means then I'm a
believer. What I've never believed is that God is watching over us, or has a personal
interest in the state of our individual souls. In fact, if God exists at all, I think
he/she/it must be a deity devoted to monumental indifference, or else, as Stephen
Fry says, why dream up bone cancer in children?

Yes, I'm scared, but not all the time. When I was first diagnosed I was terrified.
I had no idea that the body could turn against itself and incubate its own enemy.
I had never
been seriously ill in my life before; now suddenly I was face to face
with my own mortality. There was a moment when I saw my body in the mirror as if
for the first time. Overnight my own flesh had become alien to me, the saboteur of
all my hopes and dreams. It was incomprehensible, and so frightening, I cried.

‘I can't die,' I sobbed. ‘Not me. Not now.'

But I'm used to dying now. It's become ordinary and unremarkable, something everybody,
without exception, does at one time or another. If I'm afraid of anything it's of
dying badly, of getting caught up in some process that prolongs my life unnecessarily.
I've put all the safeguards in place. I've completed an advanced health directive
and given a copy to my palliative care specialist. I've made it clear in my conversations,
both with him and with my family, that I want no life-saving interventions at the
end, nothing designed to delay the inevitable. My doctor has promised to honour my
wishes, but I can't help worrying. I haven't died before, so I sometimes get a bad
case of beginner's nerves, but they soon pass.

No, there is nothing good about dying. It is sad beyond belief. But it is part of
life, and there is no escaping it. Once you grasp that fact, good things can result.
I went through most of my life believing death was something that happened to other
people. In my deluded state I imagined
I had unlimited time to play with, so I took
a fairly leisurely approach to life and didn't really push myself. At least that
is one explanation for why it took me so long to write my first novel. There were
others. I had been trying to write the story of my parents for years, making character
notes, outlining plots, embarking on one false start after another. But again and
again I failed to breathe life into the thing, constrained by the fact that my parents
were still alive to read what I had written.

Once my parents were dead I didn't have to worry so much. I could say what I liked
about them without hurting their feelings. And once I knew that my own death was
looming, I could no longer make any excuses. It was now or never. I wouldn't say
that made the writing of my novel,
Me and Mr Booker
, any easier, but it spurred me
on. This was my only chance to leave for posterity a piece of work that was truly
mine. For years I'd worked on screenplays, but that was a collaborative process.
And it is usual for screenplays to disappear into a bottom drawer, never to be seen
again. I know that novels disappear too, but at least they still exist, whole works,
whether hard copy or digital, as objects, and that has always been their appeal for
me. A book stands alone. A screenplay is only a suggestion for a story, but a novel
is the thing itself.

It was a feeling like no other, in late 2011, to hold a copy of my first novel in
my hand. When Patricia
Highsmith's publisher sent her copies of her first novel,
Strangers on a Train
, she couldn't believe how much space they occupied. It seemed
so brazen to have made an object that took up room in the world. I knew what Highsmith
meant. I'd stuck my neck out at last, staked my claim to be taken seriously as a
writer, and here in my hand was the proof. Now, I thought, I can die happy.

Yes, I have regrets, but as soon as you start re-writing your past you realise how
your failures and mistakes are what define you. Take them away and you're nothing.
But I do wonder where I'd be now if I'd made different choices, if I'd been bolder,
smarter, more sure of what I wanted and how to get it. As it was, I seemed to stumble
around, making life up as I went along. Looking back, I can make some sense of it,
but at the time my life was all very makeshift and provisional, more dependent on
luck than on planning or intent.

Still, as the British psychotherapist and essayist Adam Phillips says, we are all
haunted by the life not lived, by the belief that we've missed out on something different
and better. My favourite reverie is about the life I could have led in Paris if I'd
chosen to stay there instead of returning home like I did. I was twenty-two. I'd
run away. I was meant to be in Oxford studying for a postgraduate degree in history,
but a few weeks into the first term I decided to
quit. I found Oxford both intimidating
and dull. My supervisor was an expert in the constitutional history of New South
Wales, and he was keen for me to assist with his research. He could see I was struggling
and he meant to be kind, but his offer felt more like a punishment than a helping
hand, and I prevaricated.

I had a standing invitation from my cousin and his wife to visit them in Paris, so
I emptied my bank account and bought a ticket. I remember standing on the deck of
the ferry leaving Folkestone one blustery November afternoon and thinking that my
life had just begun, that this was the start of my great adventure. France had always
had a magical allure for me, ever since my high-school French classes with the effete
Mr Collins. He made us draw maps of the country showing all the main rivers, geographical
features and agricultural products. It seemed a land of such plenitude; I vowed to
go there one day and see it for myself. As a sort of preparation for the voyage out
Mr Collins gave each of us a French name. Mine was Jeanne. I took my new name as
an invitation to adopt a whole new persona in a new language, someone more sophisticated
and worldly than I was, a girl who knew her way around. It was the possibility of
reinvention that I was drawn to—just as I still am. As soon as I stepped onto French
soil I sensed my high-school alter ego spring back into life. Jeanne bought a packet
of Gauloises to celebrate
and smoked them on the train, while reading her copy of
Marguerite Duras's
The Lover.
If only I could write like that, she thought, instantly
dismissing her lingering doubts about quitting the academic life.

My cousin met me on Rue Mouffetard and I followed him around while he bought the
ingredients for dinner. So many cheeses, wines, pastries, charcuterie. So much seafood,
all so fresh it gleamed. And so much beauty, in the passing faces, in the sensual
language, in the storybook houses winding down the hill. I could barely breathe for
happiness. I could have stayed if I'd really wanted to. I was broke, but I could
have found work if I'd tried. My cousin taught English, or I suppose there were au
pair agencies I might have telephoned. I spoke bad French, but I could have learned
the language. In fact, after two or three enchanted days, I went back to Oxford and
investigated switching to an undergraduate course in French and Spanish, only to
discover it wasn't possible on my meagre resources. I could have asked my mother
for a loan, but she was already in debt because of her divorce. And so I gave up
on Paris and came home, imagining another chance might come one day to make my move,
to slip into Jeanne's skin and write my astonishing novels in my 5th arrondissement
garret. No such luck. Naturally. But then that turned out to be fortunate, because
other opportunities arose soon enough, as they do, and other chances to
reinvent
myself in ways I could never have predicted.

The problem with reverie is that you always assume you know how the unlived life
turns out. And it is always a better version of the life you've actually lived. The
other life is more significant and more purposeful. It is impossibly free of setbacks
and mishaps. This split between the dream and the reality can be the cause of intense
dissatisfaction at times. But I am no longer plagued by restlessness. Now I see
the life I've lived as the only life, a singularity, saturated with its own oneness.
To envy the life of the alternative me, the one who stayed in Paris, or the one who
became an expert in the constitutional history of New South Wales, seems like the
purest kind of folly.

No, I don't believe in an afterlife. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes sums it up for
me. We come from nothingness and return to nothingness when we die. That is one meaning
of the circle beloved of calligraphers in Japan, just a big bold stroke, starting
at the beginning and travelling back to it in a round sweep.
In my beginning is my
end
says T. S. Eliot.
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth/Which is already
flesh, fur and faeces/Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
When I first read
Four Quartets
at school it was like a revelation. The world was just as he described
it and no other way, a place where beauty and corruption cohabit and are often indistinguishable.

When the Buddhist nun who sometimes visits me asked me if I believed in an afterlife
I said I thought we are only remembered for so long, by the people who knew us, and
that after friends and family are gone we're forgotten. I told her about the cemeteries
in the Japanese porcelain town Arita, where my husband and I have bought a house.
The town officially dates back four hundred years, but presumably there were farmers
there before the potters arrived. Way past its heyday, Arita is now host to far more
dead than living inhabitants, so that whatever route you take through its narrow,
winding streets you soon come upon graveyards packed with monuments to the deceased.
It's easy to tell which of them are remembered, because some graves are beautifully
kept and often visited. It's just as easy to tell which of the dead have been completely
forgotten, as their graves are crumbling and overgrown with weeds. In some corners
you'll even find memorial stones jumbled together willynilly, unceremoniously sidelined
to make space for newcomers.

I told the nun that Shin, a painter, had decided to move to Arita because he liked
the idea of painting on porcelain instead of on perishable materials like paper or
canvas. Arita is littered with porcelain shards everywhere you look. All around the
old kiln sites you pick up bits of blue and white porcelain plates, cups, teapots.
The bed of the river
that runs through the town is layered with discarded bits of
porcelain, pieces of pots that cracked in the firing or were found wanting in some
other way and were simply flung out the windows of the workshops into the water.
Shin likes to imagine that four hundred years from now shards of his work might be
unearthed and collected by some curious traveller, just as he likes to unearth and
collect fragments of work painted by his predecessors. In that way, he says, he will
have achieved a degree of immortality. I say that I feel the same way about my work.
I like to think that, long after I'm gone, someone somewhere might read a book or
essay of mine in a last remaining library or digital archive and be touched in some
way.

The nun listens politely to my theories of the afterlife but I can tell she doesn't
agree with me. I get the feeling that for her things are not as simple as I describe
them. I don't pretend to understand her belief system but I imagine it assumes the
existence of another place, separate from this one. What else can she mean when she
describes the essential spirit departing the body for the ‘ether'? This is where
religion gets too cryptic for me, or maybe it's just that language is inadequate
to describe the indescribable.

I'm much more drawn to all of the ordinary ways in which we cheat death. It might
be through the evocative power of the objects we leave behind, or it might be in
a form of words, a turn of the head, a way of laughing. I was
sitting at dinner the
other night with some very old friends of ours. They'd met my mother many times,
back when she was still herself, before she became ill. The wife looked hard at me
for a while.