A good obituary can capture and explain these contrasts and help us sympathise with the forces that provoked them. After all, the actor is only a heightened version of the tendency in many of us to spend so much of our lives auditioning for roles we fancied that we never fully embraced the one scripted for us. Marion Morrison wasn’t John Wayne. He acted John Wayne. As do many of us in our own way. And that’s fine – as long as we acknowledge the distance between the act and the real thing before it’s too late. The tragedy is to die without knowing who you were, to keep the act going till the end. Like the student in a poem by Lynda Pastan who studied so long for life that she woke one morning to discover someone was already walking down the aisle collecting the papers.
The beauty of getting near death is that it gives us a last shot at reality, at owning and admitting our real selves. When I was writing my memoir, Leaving Alexandria, I became aware that it had become an extended act of self-examination. I see no reason now to revise the verdict on myself I reached then. Like Peter the Apostle – maybe this is why he moves me so much – I have spent much of my life wanting and sometimes pretending to be the kind of person I admired but wasn’t. I think of them as people who don’t get in their own way, people who do not appear to bother very much about themselves. What they have in abundance is a capacity for application to the task in hand, whatever it is. They stick at things. As well as being the mark of the saint, this is also the mark of the great scholar. In a word, they possess patience. ‘Patience’ has the same root as the word ‘suffer’. It is the ability to endure not only pain, but boredom, the grind of necessity. I was good at enduring physical pain but bad at enduring dullness and lack of excitement.
It manifested itself as an irritation with the boredom of the small print, the detail of the agenda, and a failure to finish things. Always an enthusiastic starter, I was too impatient to be a good finisher. My life has been littered with attempts to play musical instruments and learn languages and acquire technical understanding of the devices and machines I used without knowing how they worked. None of it was achieved to any level of accomplishment. Fortunately, there were a few occasions when there were people around me who were able to finish what I had impulsively started – and some good was done. The starter impulse is still there, and I occasionally give it a flourish by revisiting an old failure. And I wonder what that was all about. I try to console myself with Isaiah Berlin’s parable of the fox and the hedgehog. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one important thing.95 The trouble is I am neither fox nor hedgehog. I know a little about many things but not a lot about anything.
I see now that there was something visceral about my impatience, something that was part of my physical and psychological make up. And it had a dark side. It made me a dangerous driver. I had four serious road accidents in my life, all of them my fault. Two on motor bikes, two in cars, for one of which I had my licence removed for a time. My wife Jeannie says my problem is I have a ‘driven’ personality. It made me a risk taker, impatient with any rules and processes that might slow me down. Even walking on the hills I could never take it easy. I suppose it had some good sides to it. I was an editor’s dream. I never missed a deadline, though my speed could make for sloppy writing. And I was good at chairing meetings, most of which go on far too long and many of which are a waste of time, anyway. Getting there was always the point for me – but where’s there? And why the rush? I wonder now if I was catching up on myself after a tough start and a patchy education. Was I trying to prove that the Random Street boy could make it – or fake it – with the best of them?
Looking back, what I regret most about the rush is missing so much of my own life. I don’t mean missing it now. I mean missing it then, missing it while I was in the midst of it. I am sorry I did not pay more attention to the world while I was racing through it, particularly to those who were close to me. I am also sorry I was never the sort of boy who was fascinated by the natural world and busied himself in learning how it worked. I never studied birds or watched butterflies or explored the changes in frog spawn. On the hills, which I started walking as a very young boy, I didn’t pay attention to what was actually around me. It was the movement that was important to me, as well as the dreams I was conjuring in my imagination as I strode on. This is the weakness of the romantic temperament. It spends too much emotional energy pursuing the elusive and fascinating other, rather than concentrating on the gift that is actually close at hand. I wish more of my attention had been spent on the ‘here’ of my life rather than on the ‘elsewhere’ I was in pursuit of.
Apart from my inherent impatience, I suspect that this tendency always to be looking ahead rather than looking around was intensified by catching the religious bug early. It diverted me into spending too much time trying to understand life rather than just living it. I was in my head rather than in the world. Rather than learning all I could about the world that enveloped me, a bit of me got diverted into obsessing about where it came from. Before he died a few years ago, I took this question to a philosopher friend I discussed these things with. ‘Why is there something and not just nothing?’ ‘Richard,’ he replied, ‘there just is. Get used to it!’ Not that there has to be a conflict between these two fascinations, between the ‘What’ and the ‘Wherefrom’. I know some who have kept them in perfect balance, fascinated both by the world’s life and the mystery of its origins. I never achieved that balance. Now I regret not knowing what I was looking at when I did look at the earth and the creatures it nurtured, including the ones who nurtured me.
That’s why I am grateful to old age for slowing me down at last and, in Clive James’s phrase, for helping me ‘see the cosmic blaze and feel its grandeur’ before it’s too late. I am also glad I figured myself out before the end, though I wish I’d done it sooner. It would have helped me had I realised earlier that my acceleration system wasn’t in sync with my braking system. But it was the life I was dealt, the cards I was given to play. No Saint or Scholar among them, but a few useful ones, nevertheless. And I can say this: whatever else it lacked, my life was rarely boring. Still, I hope I have enough time left at the table to get better at what Nietzsche called amor fati,96 love of the fate I was dealt, the life that wove itself on the loom, the person I was. Maybe even to love him the way Derek Walcott commanded:
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you.97
The stranger who was yourself and who has loved you? It’s intriguing the way poets are convinced some of us are destined to get to know and accept ourselves only when we are close to the final disclosure of death. Michael Donaghy said almost the same thing in the poem I have already quoted from:
For the face they now cover
is a stranger’s and it always has been.98
Befriending the stranger within, the stranger who was yourself, is an elusive but liberating idea to get hold of. But it can be difficult to understand. It’s easier to grasp the importance of loving the stranger who is not yourself, though we find that just as hard to do. The Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament tells us why we should try:
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers:
for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.99
Fear of the stranger seems to be deep in the human psyche. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that it might even have had survival value during the childhood of our species. Sometimes they were out to get us. Wherever it came from, it can close our hearts and minds to ‘the other’ and the good news they could be bringing us. That’s why the unknown author of the Letter to the Hebrews likened them to angels. And it’s why the poet Louis MacNeice took the idea further:
For every static world that you or I impose
Upon the real one must crack at times and new
Patterns from new disorders open like a rose
And old assumptions yield to new sensation;
The Stra
nger in the wings is waiting for his cue,
The fuse is always laid to some annunciation.100
The poet tells us to be open to the strangers in our midst or we’ll miss their annunciations, the good news they bring us. I get that. What is harder to get hold of is the idea that the stranger who is myself might also bring a gift if I welcome him home. How am I to understand that and act upon it? The clue lies in six words from those lines from Derek Walcott I have already quoted: ‘. . . give back your heart to itself ’.
Those of us who have spent much of our lives wanting or pretending to be someone else have been disloyal to the self we were. Yet another example of the craving the Buddha told us was the source of all human misery, even if it was only the desire to be a different person: someone better looking or cleverer or holier or purer or braver – anyone other than the self we were. That was always impossible, the poet tells us, so before it is too late give back your heart to yourself. Say ‘Yes’ to the stranger you were. He’s been in the wings all your life, waiting for his cue, waiting to be invited onstage. He doesn’t mind that you’ve left it till the curtain is about to fall. He understands that was in the cards like everything else. But there’s one last card to play, and he wants you to play it bravely, as yourself.
Just the way the Duke did. It was in his dying that John Wayne finally became John Wayne. At the end he was brave not just up there on illusion’s bright screen but in a real hospital on a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. And this time it wasn’t a line from a movie. It was an act of personal bravery. Courage can be death’s last gift to us, if we’ll grasp it.
Another sad romancer who came to himself at the end was my old friend Saint Peter. We have already watched him auditioning for the role of hero in the gospels, knowing in his heart he was a fraud. As they say in Texas, Peter was all hat and no cattle. And that seems to have been his story right up to the end. There is no obituary of Peter in the gospels, no official account of his death. The history books are silent as well. But there is a legend I like because, fiction or not, there is something authentic about its take on the old betrayer. According to the story, Peter was an old man in Rome when the Emperor Nero started to persecute Christians as a cover for his own guilt for the fire that was destroying the city. Again Peter’s courage failed him. The legend describes him making his escape from persecution in Rome, trudging along the Via Appia, on the run again. Was he thinking about his three denials that night thirty years before? Did he hear the cock crow as he reached the edge of the city? And did the Lord turn and look at him? This time it was different. This time Jesus walks towards him.
Quo vadis Domine? asked Peter.
Where are you going, Lord?
Eo Romam iterum crucifigi, replied Jesus.
I am going to Rome to be crucified again.
Again Peter bursts into tears. But this time he turns round and goes back to Rome and his own crucifixion. The legend says that when the moment came he asked to be crucified upside down because of his lifetime of desertions. That has an authentic, over-the-top Petrine touch to it, a bit of characteristic swagger. ‘Time to face the truth,’ he thinks to himself. This time he did. And it didn’t matter that it had taken him his whole life to get there. A life takes as long as it takes to bring us to our truth, even if we only make it on our death bed.
I have said it before. I shall say it again. We didn’t get to deal our hand in life. We only got to the play the cards we were given. And how we play the last card can win the game. A death well faced can be redemptive of a life that may not have been well lived. There’s something of this idea in the Christian and Islamic tradition of the martyr whose voluntary death can purge the sins of a lifetime. A moment of courage at the end can wipe out a lifetime of failure and excess. There is a lot of darkness in the history of the doctrine in both those religions, of course, and it still plays out grimly in today’s headlines. But the truth remains that a brave and reconciled death can perfect an imperfect life. It places a full stop on the script. Another story is completed. That’s why I read obituaries religiously now; waiting for the period to be stamped onto the last sentence of the last paragraph; praying that I’ll do my own dying well when my last page is turned.
But what has surprised me most about obituaries is that reading them as a regular discipline helps to reconcile me to my own death. They work like those meetings of substance abusers who help each other overcome their addictions by owning and sharing them. Reading obituaries encourages me to confess my own condition. I take my place in the wide circle in the waiting room and say to the others assembled there: ‘Good evening. My name is Richard, and I suffer from a terminal disease called mortality. Like all of you in here tonight, I am waiting for the last bus.’ It’s strangely comforting.
As the days of my years blow away like pages from a calendar in an old black-and-white movie, I know it’s maybe not far away, the date of my death. But the thickening fall of all these obituaries reminds me I’ll be among friends. Anxiety fades as I recognise that my name has also been enrolled in the great democracy of the dead. Sooner or later the bus will be along for me. But I’ve been a walker all my life, so when I hear its approach afar off I hope I’ll have time to lace on my boots and set out to meet it. I’ll try to take it easy this time.
. . . I think I’ll take a road I used to know
That goes by Slieve-na-garagh and the sea.
And all day breasting me the wind will blow,
And I’ll hear nothing but the peewit’s cry
And the sea talking in the caves below.
I think it will be winter when I die
(For no-one from the North could die in spring)
And all the heather will be dead and grey,
And the bog-cotton will have blown away,
And there will be no yellow on the whin.
But I shall smell the peat
And when it’s almost dark I’ll set my feet
Where a white track goes glimmering to the hills,
And see, far up, a light . . . 101
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book began its life as a series of broadcast essays delivered on BBC Radio 4 in the slot that follows the One O’clock News. The suggestion for the series came from James Murray, whose company Butterfly Wings Productions Limited produced it for the BBC in January 2016 under the title ‘Three Score Years and Ten’. Encouraged by my agent Caroline Dawnay and my then editor at Canongate, Jenny Lord, I used the broadcasts as the impetus for writing this book, and I am grateful to them for their pressure and encouragement. I am also extremely grateful to my new editor at Canongate, Simon Thorogood, for all the care and attention he brought to the editing of the text as it emerged, and I’d like to thank Rafaela Romaya, Canongate’s Art Director, for the beautiful cover she has designed for the book.
I am extremely grateful to Marion Goldsmith and Rena Mackay for allowing me to use excerpts from the addresses I gave at the funerals of their husbands, both of whom I remember with deep affection.
I am also grateful to the Niven family for allowing me to use the address I gave at the wedding of Amy and Graham.
I owe my wife Jeannie more than I can find words for, but I am particularly grateful to her for her advice on bereavement counselling, a subject on which she is a practised expert.
I read a lot of poetry, so every poem quoted in this book I have discovered myself – except one, ‘Goodbye to the Villa Piranha’ by Francis Hope. I found it in Alan Bennett’s Keeping On Keeping On and knew immediately it would be important to me. I am grateful to Alan Bennett for the discovery.
My dog Daisy died as this book was going through the final stages of the copy-editing process. She was seventeen years old and for every minute of those years she was happiest when she was beside me. We walked thousands of miles together on the Pentland Hills till she was too old and tired to keep up. The first trek I took without her was on Good Friday four years ago. It see
med the right day for it and I wept as I strode through the Green Cleugh without her wee body trotting behind me, close at my heels.
Her final years were of peaceful decline. Slower walks round the block. Having to be carried upstairs. More visits to the vet. Sleeping most of the time, though dogs have always been great at that anyway.
We held her close as the kindly vet released her from what had become a painful disintegration.
Given how old I am, she will not be replaced. Daisy was my last dog. And the years blow away like leaves in the wind.
RH
NOTES
1 Bede. History of the English Church and People. Bk IV, c.13. Translated by Leo Sherley Price. London: Penguin, 1956.
2 Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Act III, sc. iii, 73.
3 Luke 16:9, Revised English Bible. Oxford University Press, 1989.
4 Turner, Charles Tennyson. Collected Poems. 1880.
5 Binyon, Laurence. ‘The Burning of the Leaves’. In: The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 102.
6 Psalm 90:10. In: Scottish Prayer Book. Edinburgh: Cambridge University Press, 1929, p. 629.
7 Yeats, W.B. The Poems. London: Everyman’s Library Classics, 1992, p. 239.
8 Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 2003, p. 190.
9 Bruce, George. ‘Departure and Departure and . . .’ In: Lucinda Prestige (ed.), Today, Tomorrow: The Collected Poems of George Bruce 1933–2000. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2001.
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