by Philip Gould
Gail has carefully read everything I have written on the subject. Grace has read it, and Georgia has read it too. But I am making the decisions here, nobody else, and there is, I recognise, an arrogance involved and a lack of humility.
So many people told me to tell the truth. So many doctors, so many surgeons, so many people kept on coming back and saying, ‘Please tell the truth.’ Especially about the surgery I underwent. So I think I have done the right thing. I have been careful – though perhaps not careful enough. But I would do it again, for sure.
I think the gains have been enormous. The gains for Gail have certainly been enormous. She has changed from someone who was private about cancer and about death to someone who wants to be public about it and who now actually wants more information to be put out there.
The kids are starting to get anxious, even a bit angry about things sometimes. Death is about abandonment. Everybody will have concerns and feel sadness and anger about abandonment. I can see that. But nonetheless the children too believe there have been gains as well as losses. What I have done in talking and writing about my illness has been hugely important for us, and not the kind of thing I could do too often. I have been nervous about it all the way through. But I was determined to do it and I am determined to continue doing it as long as I can.
The point of life is that you evolve, change, develop, and become a different person. The idea is that life is something that you actually do.
I certainly do not think that a sudden, unexpected death – dropping dead, as they say – would be better than what confronts me. You would lose so much. Of course, it would be nice to avoid confronting death, nice to blunt that sharp edge. And you would avoid a lot of pain, I suppose. But I think those things are far outweighed by the things you gain from knowing that you are going to die and having the chance to act on that knowledge.
To have three months, or two months, or one month, or even a week in which to actually sit down and to fulfil and complete your relationships is almost the greatest gift that death can offer. If you can accept death, the process of grieving that follows may still be intense but it will pass and will ultimately be fulfilling and elevating. And if you can look death in the eye and accept it, and then fulfil your relationships, that is healing.
* * *
In the last few weeks I have had to come to terms with all that I have done in sixty years of living. Making sense of this is important. And it is not a passive process of reconciliation but an active one.
All this experience comes together. All the extraordinary connections and relationships made during a relatively long life must be considered. And in the many reconciliations and reckonings of this process there is the power of fulfilment. This is when you surge forward and grow. I feel I am surging forward and growing at a pace that I have never experienced before.
This surge of understanding takes you into a different state of being. All of us tend to think in terms of linear time. One thing follows another. But this is only one form of time’s many complexities. I can no longer think like that.
What good is it to me to think in terms of conventional time? Six months or nine months no longer exist for me. So I am trying to make sense of the world not through time but through emotion, through relationships, through feeling.
I am looking at the world through this great collection of emotions and relationships and progressions and changes. All at once. That is what is happening for me now. When I try to push forward in terms of conventional time, to look ahead, to count the minutes or the hours or the days, sooner rather than later I hit a solid rock: I am dead on the other side of this.
I think instead in terms of other, richer conceptions of progression – relationships, emotional connection, spiritual understanding, the sense of God, the sense of divinity. There is no future for me now so I am flowing back and this here, now, is the place for everything. Here, now, is where I live, where all these ideas and feelings circle on themselves.
Of course, for a short while at least, I can look forward to tomorrow. I have looked forward to every single day this week and every single day this week has been better than the day that preceded it. Every single moment is almost better than the moment that preceded it.
I feel nothing but optimism. I know that the future will be bad. I know that it will be difficult. I know that there will be those horrible moments when the stomach does this and the stomach does that, and God knows what else. I know all that.
But life cannot be better than this. I cannot feel better than this. I do not see how life can be better for me than this. I know how life can be better for those who care for me and love me. I understand that, I do not try to deny that. But for me, even though this may well be the worst of times, it is also the best of times.
Given all that I have said here I think it is reasonable to ask what I would do if I was offered the chance to have the death sentence suddenly, miraculously, lifted. Would I prefer that, even if I had to give up all the things that I have found here in the Death Zone? It is a difficult question.
I would have to accept the offer for the sake of Gail and for the kids. I do understand that my family wants more time with me and I respect that. But I believe that this is the right place for me and I want to be here in this state of mind and to die in it if I can. I am, I hope anyway, a different and better person than the one I was before this happened.
This is what I am meant to be. This is what I am meant to do. I have to make this more than just a good intention. By my example, I want to change things for other people as well.
I am comfortable with my life now. This is a frightening process, of course. But it is also true that it is possible to confront that fear and transcend it. You go to another place. You really do.
I have had a lot worse happen to me in the last four years than is going to happen in the next four weeks. It will be difficult but I hope, I believe, I think, ultimately it will be sublime. That is not to say it will be sublime in some great religious sense, although it might be, but I believe there will be a quality of the sublime about it.
I feel very calm. I feel at rest. I have found that the experience of the last few weeks has been as good as it is possible for the experience to be. And that has been typical of my life since I entered the Death Zone.
Going to my Grave
When I was recovering from my surgery in Newcastle I began to think once again about arranging my own burial plot. So I called Highgate Cemetery and asked if they had any plots. They did, I was told, and I was given the name of a man to speak to about it. And then, what with one thing and another, I forgot about the idea.
When I was diagnosed as being terminally ill, and told that my death was coming sooner rather than later, I remembered again. I called the number I had been given. The person I had been told to contact had left the cemetery but the man on the end of the phone said he would look after me anyway.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘My name is Victor. I’m the gravedigger.’
Of course I expected Victor to be a six-foot-six giant with a big shovel over one shoulder. And when I met him he turned out to be a six-foot-six giant with a shovel over one shoulder.
Victor Herman deals all the time with people who are dying, and quite often with people like me who are about to die. He is the sexton, and although he has worked at Highgate for twenty-two years, he actually dug his first grave there ten years before that, when he was fourteen. His father had been the head gravedigger there for years and so he and his family were part of the history of the whole place.
Victor and I and Gail wandered around the cemetery a couple of times. He would suggest a spot here or there, but they were not the kind of places I wanted.
I wanted a bigger plot, somewhere that could become almost a communal place for our family and friends. I was looking not so much for a burial plot as a burial place, I suppose, a meeting place, something physical that you could see and connect to.
Victor may be big but he is gen
tle with it: he was wonderful with Gail. He gave her great comfort because he has had so much experience of dealing with death.
He dealt with us beautifully. It was a wonderful morning and at last we chose a spot.
Finding a physical place for me was a huge step forward. On the one hand it was a place to which people who are still alive can come and connect to me. For my daughters in particular that would be a good thing. And on the other hand it enabled me to see the place where I was going to spend eternity. Here was the place where my family and friends could come to find me.
And perhaps not only people who knew me. There will be people about the place looking at the graves, looking at my grave, so it will be almost a communal meeting point between the dead and the living. It sounds very romantic, I know. But the dead and the living are both part of our lives. It gives me great comfort to know that I will be there.
This morning I stood at my grave and I thought: God, I do feel very, very happy to be going to this place. That is a small victory for a different view of death.
As this process goes on, as death gets closer, my experiences become more and more tense, but also more and more joyful. They are surprising, too. Things happen that I would not have expected to happen. Coincidences occur. I find I have entered a world which is not as I thought it would be. It is much better than I thought it would be. The ground rules, the nature of reality, in this world are different.
I knew it would be special this morning when we went to my grave, and it was. I was photographed at my place of interment. I am now alive but later I will be dead. It was very powerful and led to a whole series of connections that were quite surprising and unexpected.
This morning, I did not feel that I was in a dead place. I did not think this morning that I was in a place from which energy had gone, at which the process of decline was starting. I did not feel that this was somehow the beginning of decay.
Instead I saw that this too was life. It was the taking of us from what we are to being something different. And that, I think, is the process of death.
I had an absolutely wonderful trip yesterday with my two daughters. It did not start that way. I was not feeling well and I was in and out of the car before we began. So we all felt a bit frazzled and tense as we set off. But as we travelled away from London, things changed.
We went to all the places where I used to spend my time as a young boy. We went from one meaningful place to another. We went to my school, to my childhood home, to the place where I used to play football, where I used to play sport.
We had a house on a canal and I remember this canal as always being quite pretty. It was so pretty yesterday when we visited.
We went to my parents’ graves and I told Georgia and Grace, not for the first time, that there is still not a day that goes past that I do not miss them.
Every place we went imparted a certain power to our journey, and so as we went from one to another the feelings became more and more powerful, until by the end we were all in a state of joy. We were suddenly happy as a family and at the end Georgia said: ‘It was the most perfect day.’
And this on the back of a couple of days which had been among the most difficult I have had recently. There was a quality of specialness about that day that would not have been possible were it not that the stakes were so high. It would not have happened were it not for us knowing and accepting that I would die of cancer soon.
My daughters know I am going to die and I know that I am going to die. In those circumstances we are all willing to do something as potentially difficult and upsetting as making this journey together back into my past.
Death gives meaning to life and the knowledge that you are going to die one day gives you the sense that there is meaning in your life. When you are going to die soon, you really do feel the absolute intensity of life. Life becomes completely precious, not just because there is so little of it left but because the actual nature of experience is more fulfilling, more protean than it was before. I feel there are somehow more molecules moving around the room now.
Death is going to happen to everybody, but it is happening to me now.
A few more days passed. We were outside London, enjoying the countryside and bringing the family together as I prepared for the next round of chemotherapy. Over the weekend I noticed I was experiencing a form of breathlessness. I could not walk up the stairs or move quickly or dramatically without having difficulty breathing.
We waited until Tuesday before doing anything about it because that was the day I was due in hospital to start that next round of treatment. The medical staff took one look at me and steered me away from chemotherapy and towards a new diagnosis. I had blood tests and X-rays.
The results were clear. A dangerous level of infection had entered my lungs and there was also widespread inflammation, which was the cause of my breathlessness. It was clear that my body would be unable to cope with the ravages of treatment.
On Thursday 3 November, David Cunningham comes in to see me entirely alone. He leaves his entourage outside. He tells me that it does not look as though the therapies and, in particular, the steroids they have been giving me are having the desired effect. Some of my blood tracings are good, others are not.
I ask him what the worst case is for me now.
Three to five days, he says.
What is the best case?
Three or four weeks.
Just as being told I had three months to live had been a much bigger shock than any bad news I had received before, this new timetable, being told I might die in three days, is another quantum leap.
On hearing previous diagnoses I was uncertain about the future. This time I am not. I know my purpose.
I am endeavouring to be honest about the reality of death. I am trying to make clear its importance and help inspire others as they move towards it.
I know how hard this is to do but I want to try.
In her book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross says that with love this period can be the most fulfilling and extraordinary time of life. I am sure she is right. Death provides the creative tension in everybody’s life, but when you enter the Death Zone the intensity is either overwhelming or extraordinary in its possibilities.
I have no doubt that this pre-death period is the most important and potentially the most fulfilling and the most inspirational time of my life. In this world, conventional time becomes meaningless. You map your course according to the coordinates of emotion and feelings, compassion and love.
I am approaching the door marked Death. What lies beyond it may be the worst of things. But I believe it will be the best of things.
Four Days Left to Change the World
Georgia Gould
Dad went into the Marsden for the last time on the Tuesday. He was not rushed in; it was his routine chemotherapy appointment.
We had been preparing for a long period of steady decline, of hospices, of slowing down and goodbyes. We had lived with cancer for so long that we were used to his periods of gauntness and sickness, used to seeing his body wasted and thin, his skin dry and peeling. These things were not necessarily signs of impending death but reactions to the treatment – the scars of cancer.
We knew, of course, his prognosis. His cancer was terminal. We were two months into the three that Professor Cunningham had predicted for him. Death had become something we lived with: making group tours of Highgate Cemetery, poring over funeral plans and strategising for posthumous publication. But, at least to me, death still always felt one step removed. Dad was always there, an active, engaged participant in the discussion – very much alive.
Even Dad, who relentlessly faced up to the truth of his condition, had moments when reality escaped him. I remember him saying that he had been sitting admiring his new shoes, thinking they looked smart enough for the funeral – before catching himself and remembering he would not actually be attending the funeral, at least not in a way that he need worry about shoes. He would joke that he had m
ade such a fuss of dying that he needed a contingency plan if he did not die when he had predicted.
When someone is so full of life, humour, wisdom, so much themselves, it is easy not to see their body wasting away, easy to forget how stark the difference is between life and death. There is a big space between knowledge and acceptance.
Dad was determinedly trying to prepare my sister and me for his death. He knew better than us how highly we all had to value the time left. He invested everything he could in giving us the tools we would need for life, answering questions we did not even know we would have for him.
* * *
On the Thursday before he went into hospital he had organised a trip to Brookwood, the place where he grew up. This still stands out for me as a perfect day.
I had been up all night finishing a report. My sister, Grace, was stressed about her work. But Dad was insistent there would not be another chance for us to go together. And so we went. Dad had organised a car as Mum was not around and she is still the only member of the family who can drive. Dad was struggling with nausea and we had to stop and go back twice for more anti-sickness medication. But he took all the drugs he had and somehow he settled.
When we left it was the kind of beautiful, bright morning that we had no right to expect just as November was about to start. First, we went to visit his parents’ grave in Woking. I had been there with him many times before. He had always told us that his parents were an ever-present part of his life.
The cemetery was pristinely kept. The autumnal colours sparkled in the sun. The place had an almost magical feel, and painted a peaceful picture of death. Dad was able to pay there and then to extend his parents’ plot for the next twenty-five years and this seemed to take a weight off his mind – he had looked after them for one final time.