a recent issue of the magazine Brain: January 2016.
inspired by Burroughs: ‘Apomorphine,’ he wrote later, ‘acts on the back brain to normalize the bloodstream in such a way that the enzyme system of addiction is destroyed.’
this was the focus: see Robert McCrum on Lees and Burroughs, Observer, 26 October 2014. See also Lees, Mentored by a Madman.
Once the difficult diagnosis: Andrew Lees, Alzheimer’s: The Silent Plague (London, 2012), p. 13.
The poet W. H. Auden once compared: Auden’s line is persistently misquoted. It first occurs in ‘Marginalia’ in 1965, where the poet writes about the ‘thought of his own death / Like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic.’
Her husband, John Bayley, reported: see John Bayley, Iris, p. 41.
Bayley recalls ‘a brisk exchange’: ibid., p. 53.
‘Our mode of communication’: ibid., p. 70.
‘Dressing most days’: ibid., p. 81.
‘Most days are in fact’: ibid., p. 58.
‘I made a savage comment’: ibid., p. 249.
‘The exasperation of being followed’: ibid., p. 255.
‘The words which Iris used’: ibid., p. 277.
‘What will [Iris] do’: ibid., p. 274.
‘When former US president’: Lees, Alzhiemer’s, p. 17.
8. Do No Harm
‘How does it feel’, he asks: Henry Marsh, Do No Harm, p. ix.
‘Much of what happens in hospitals’: ibid., p. 3.
‘It’s been a wonderful life’: ibid., p. 199.
he likes to quote René Leriche: ibid., p. 5.
‘I may very well have to go through a time’: In Do No Harm, Marsh also writes, ‘I must hope that I live my life now in such a way that, like my mother, I will be able to die without regret’, p. 199.
Marsh knows what dying can mean: Henry Marsh, Do No Harm, p. 198.
As Sickness is the greatest misery: John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation V.
9. Astride of a Grave
One serving nurse: comments added to Merriam Webster’s online edition.
etymology provides a helpful corrective: Merriam Webster, online.
‘One day he went dumb’: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 89.
The ‘sleeping sickness’ pandemic of 1916–17: Oliver Sacks, Awakenings, pp. xxvi–xxxviii.
a kaleidoscope of bizarre: Lees, op. cit., p. 52.
10. The Will to Live
‘People’s capacity to survive’: Phillips, op. cit., p. 115.
one every ten minutes: In the UK, twelve thousand will die from breast cancer every year.
Kate heard from a close friend: IORT is still in the trial stage, and is awaiting approval from NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence).
11. The Person Who Was Ill
‘the commonest neurological cause’: Andrew Lees, Alzheimer’s (London, 2012), p. 24.
12. Where Are We Going?
It was in 1817 that Dr James Parkinson: see Sacks, Awakenings, p. 3. See also Andrew Lees, Alzheimer’s (London, 2012).
For Max, his diagnosis of Parkinson’s: for a witty, personal account of the disease, see Michael Kinsley, Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide (New York, 2016).
Van Gogh’s three questions: 1897, Paul Gauguin, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
‘Grief turns out to be a place’: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 188.
‘Words have a longevity’: Paul Kalanithi: When Breath Becomes Air, p. 53.
13. The Good Death
‘Be absolute for death’: Measure for Measure, 3, i, 4–5.
‘We defy augury’: Hamlet, 5, ii, 218–22.
Tolstoy’s novella: Leo Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilych, translated by Aylmer and Louise Maude (OUP, 1935). I have taken all quoted extracts from this edition.
Russian writers doing things: see Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, translated by Aylmer and Louise Maude.
‘Everyone owes nature a death’: see Katie Roiphe, The Violet Hour. I have drawn freely on her account of Freud’s last days.
14. The Necessity of Dying
‘I can remember being in Bristol’: Phillips has given another account of this phase to the Paris Review, ‘The Art of Non-fiction’, no. 7, issue 208, Spring 2014. ‘When I was seventeen, I read Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and I thought it was an interesting, exciting life. And then I read D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality when it came out, and I had a tremendous feeling of affinity for the book. I don’t exactly know what I thought of it – I can’t remember exactly – but I felt that I completely understood it, and I knew then that I wanted to be a child psychotherapist.’ (Interview with Paul Holdengräber).
‘When I started in psychoanalysis’: Paris Review, 2014.
It’s time to talk about what Freud: ‘We must make friends with the necessity of dying’. Freud, S. (1913). [SEL289a1] The Theme of the Three Caskets. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911–1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works, pp. 289–302 edited by James Strachey. Collected Papers, 4 (London, Hogarth Press, 1925).
This is a response echoed by the American playwright Wallace Shawn: Guardian, 26 November 2015.
‘We’ve begun rejecting the institutionalized’: Gawande op. cit., p. 93.
‘People’s capacity to survive’: see Adam Phillips, Darwin’s Worms, p. 115–16.
‘[They] thought of themselves as trying to tell’: ibid., p. 11.
Phillips goes on to quote Wallace Stevens: op. cit., p. 12.
15. Last Words
‘It is profoundly interesting to know’: quoted in Gordon Bowker, George Orwell (London, 2003), p. 413.
‘It would be hard to pin down’: Katie Roiphe, op. cit., p. 8.
‘He parted just between twelve and one’: William Shakespeare: Henry the Fifth, Act II, scene 3. There are differing versions of this speech, derived from differing, and often corrupt, Quarto and Folio editions.
On learning that he was mortally ill: Hume’s memoir is cited in Oliver Sacks, Gratitude (London, 2015), pp 16–17.
Boswell’s report of that last meeting: see The Private Papers of James Boswell, Geoffrey Scott and Frederick A. Pottle, eds. (London and New York, 1951), vol. 12, pp. 227–32.
‘And now, weak, short of breath’: Oliver Sacks, Gratitude, p. 45.
‘If it were a race’: Jenni Diski, In Gratitude, p. 156.
16. One Foot In The Grave
‘What is it worth, then’: from ‘Event Horizon’, Sentenced to Life (London, 2015).
to recite some of Catullus: I am grateful to Nigel Williams for his free translation of ‘Carmen 101’.
I’ve flown, my brother, to this wretched thing
Your funeral, where I’m supposed to give
Some useless compliments to your dumb dust
That foul disease has taken you from me.
Oh my unhappy brother – it’s not fair –
But I must, in the meantime, pay my dues
As we did for our parents when they died.
So, take my tears, that fall and will not dry
In everlasting greeting and goodbye.
17. Staring at the Sun
‘There is nothing you can do’: Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck, p. 202.
‘Finally, a good plot’: I am advised by David Benedict that many have claimed this gag. Most plausible was Larry Gelbart – co-author of A funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and the producer/creator of M*A*S*H. He also wrote Tootsie.
‘My father spent’: Jon Henley, the Guardian, 3 February 2016.
‘Death doesn’t really feel eventual’: Ephron, op. cit., p. 205.
18. The Dying of the Light
‘The common people are not stupid’: Pratchett: op. cit., pp. 359–61.
‘The stoppage of circulation’: Sherwin Nuland, How We Die (New York, 1993), p. xviii.
‘Dying – the fact of
death’: see also Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (London, 1964), pp. 151–52.
‘If I were a writer of books’: (Michael Screech, trans.) – Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1991), p. 87.
‘Our culture is imbued’: Julia Samuel, Grief Works (London, 2017), p. 45.
19. The Nowness of Everything
readers get a thrill from the special: see Blake Morrison, ‘Too much information?’, Guardian, 27 November 2015.
‘Let us disarm Death’: Screech, op. cit., p. 92.
‘No one ever told me’: Lewis, A Grief Observed (London, 1962). All subsequent quotations are from the Faber & Faber ‘Readers Edition’, 2015.
‘I find my thoughts drifting’: Sacks, Gratitude
‘I know my life is drawing’: Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things (London, 2015) p. 218.
20. A Month in the Country
‘Fear no more’: Cymbeline, 4, ii, 258–63.
Towards the end of: My Year Off (3rd edition, 2015), p. 240.
‘No man is well that understands’: John Donne, Devotions, Meditation 8, ‘The King sends his own physician’.
‘Ten years passed’: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: On Death and Dying (London, 1970).
Acknowledgements
A special thanks to various friends who provided invaluable comments, criticisms and insights at different stages of composition: Peter Bazalgette, Margy Bearn, Denys Blakeway, Hilary Boyd, Don and Cressida Connolly, William Cran, John-Paul Davidson, Charles Elton, Emma Fane, Melissa Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Frayling-Cork, Ana Perez Galvan, Malcolm Gladwell, Siri Hustvedt, Clive James, Sara Kestelman, Kirsty Lang, Christine McCrum, Henry Marsh, Adam Phillips, Jonathan Powell, Jim Smith, Salley Vickers, and, as ever, my old friend Nigel Williams.
For years, that maestro of all-round fitness Dreas Reyneke has provided a rare and exceptional mix of physical and mental consolation. My dramatic departure from his exercise studio in June 2014 provided the occasion for the start of this story. Without him, in so many ways, Every Third Thought could not have been written.
After Dreas, in the department of bien-être, sincere thanks are due to Simon Bryer for his devoted attention, and also to Susanna Chancellor for providing the perfect Umbrian sanctuary in which to complete this book.
At my newspaper the Observer, a special salute goes to my nearest colleagues Vanessa Thorpe and Paul Webster, as well as to our editor John Mulholland.
At ICM, I must thank my agent Amanda Urban; at Curtis Brown, Jonathan Lloyd; and, at Picador, my indefatigable editor Sophie Jonathan who first recognized that My Year Off was not the last word on the story of my ill-health.
From among the medical profession, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Richard Greenwood, Neil Kitchen, Martin Koltzenburg, Andrew Lees, Lynn Morgan, and Nick Ward.
I must also single out for special thanks Ben Macintyre, his pioneering Achaglachgach Writers’ Colony and its remarkable team of trustees: Charles Cumming, Blanche Girouard, Kate Hubbard, Clare Longrigg, Magnus Macintyre, Natalia Naish, and Roland Phillips.
Finally, a heart-felt thank you to Sarah Lyall; and also to our daughters Alice and Isobel to whom these words are dedicated with my love, as ever.
Permissions
‘At my father’s bedside, I learned what death looks like’ was originally printed in the Guardian on 3rd February 2016, and is extracted with permission from Guardian News and Media and Jon Henley.
Lines from ‘Balcony Scene’, ‘Event Horizon’, and ‘Sunset Hails a Rising’ by Clive James are from Sentenced to Life, Picador, 2015, copyright © Clive James 2015.
Lines from Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ appear here with permission from the author’s representatives. By Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Lines from ‘Forgetfulness’ by Billy Collins are from Questions About Angels, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999, copyright © Billy Collins 1991.
Lines from ‘Fragment of an Agon’ are from Sweeney Agonistes – Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama by T. S. Eliot (Faber and Faber, 1932).
Lyrics from ‘I Me Mine’ by George Harrison are copyright © Harrisongs Ltd, 1970.
Excerpt from Murphy, copyright © 1938 by the Estate of Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
Excerpt from On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (Routledge, 2009) is copyright © Elizabeth Kübler-Ross 1969.
The obituary from the Saco Times was published in Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram from 22 December to 23 December 2015.
Excerpts from Waiting For Godot copyright © 1954 by Grove Press, Inc.; Copyright © renewed 1982 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
ROBERT McCRUM was born and educated in Cambridge. For nearly twenty years he was editor-in-chief of the publishers Faber & Faber, until a near-fatal stroke, the subject of his acclaimed memoir, My Year Off. From 1996 to 2009 he was literary editor of the Observer and he is now an associate editor of the Observer. He is also the author of Wodehouse: A Life (2004); six novels; and the co-author of the international bestseller The Story of English (1986).
Also by Robert McCrum
Fiction
In the Secret State
A Loss of Heart
The Fabulous Englishman
Mainland
The Psychological Moment
Suspicion
Non-fiction
My Year Off
The Story of English (with William Cran and Robert MacNeil)
Wodehouse: A Life
Globish: How the English Language became the World’s Language
Children
The World Is a Banana
The Brontosaurus Birthday Cake
First published 2017 by Picador
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Copyright © Robert McCrum 2017
Cover illustration © Andrew Davidson
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