by Shaun Usher
Throughout my high school years as a basketball player, on to my college years, and up to the present day, I have bought your athletic shoes. However, as of this very day, I can assure you that I, and many of my friends, will never, EVER, contribute in any way whatsoever to your sickeningly corporate-selling tactics. You know, with people like you in the world, euthanasia has untapped possibilities.
Thank you, and I hope you choke.
Very untruly yours.
LETTER 04
I AM SO CLOSE BEHIND YOU
Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen
2016
In 1960 Leonard Cohen moved from Montreal to Hydra, a peaceful Greek island on which he would live intermittently for the next seven years and write a collection of poetry and two novels. Soon after arriving, he met and fell for Marianne Ihlen, a twenty-three-year-old Norwegian woman who had been on the island since arriving in 1958 with her husband, who had since abandoned her and their young son. The relationship blossomed. Ihlen became Cohen’s muse and she inspired, among other songs, 1967’s ‘So Long, Marianne’. But they eventually grew apart, and by the 1970s they had moved on. Decades later, in 2016, upon hearing that Ihlen’s health was failing and she had very little time left, Cohen wrote her a farewell letter. A reply soon arrived. Just a few months after her death, Cohen also passed away.
THE LETTERS
Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.
And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey.
Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.
* * *
Dear Leonard,
Marianne slept slowly out of this life yesterday evening. Totally at ease, surrounded by close friends.
Your letter came when she still could talk and laugh in full consciousness. When we read it aloud, she smiled as only Marianne can. She lifted her hand, when you said you were right behind, close enough to reach her.
It gave her deep peace of mind that you knew her condition. And your blessing for the journey gave her extra strength. Jan and her friends who saw what this message meant for her, will all thank you in deep gratitude for replying so fast and with such love and compassion.
In her last hour I held her hand and hummed Bird on a Wire, while she was breathing so lightly. And when we left the room, after her soul had flown out of the window for new adventures, we kissed her head and whispered your everlasting words
So long, Marianne
LETTER 05
THANK YOU
Dr Mark Taubert to David Bowie
January 2016
On 10 January 2016, two days after the release of David Bowie’s latest album, Blackstar, millions of hearts around the world broke with the news of Bowie’s death following an eighteen-month battle with cancer. Bowie was a true visionary, the like of whom appears once in a generation at most, and his impact on the world of music was, and remains, immense. That he planned for his final album to be released so close to his last breath makes perfect sense. For this was his goodbye. Five days later, Bowie’s son shared a letter of thanks that had been written to David Bowie by Dr Mark Taubert, a palliative care consultant working for the Velindre University NHS Trust in Cardiff.
THE LETTER
Dear David,
Oh no, don’t say it’s true – whilst realization of your death was sinking in during those grey, cold January days of 2016, many of us went on with our day jobs. At the beginning of that week I had a discussion with a hospital patient, facing the end of her life. We discussed your death and your music, and it got us talking about numerous weighty subjects, that are not always straightforward to discuss with someone facing their own demise. In fact, your story became a way for us to communicate very openly about death, something many doctors and nurses struggle to introduce as a topic of conversation. But before I delve further into the aforementioned exchange, I’d like to get a few other things off my chest, and I hope you don’t find them a saddening bore.
Thank you for the Eighties when your ChangesOneBowie album provided us with hours of joyful listening, in particular on a trip from Darmstadt to Cologne and back. My friends and I will probably always associate Diamond Dogs, Rebel Rebel, China Girl and Golden Years with that particular time in our lives. Needless to say, we had a great time in Köln.
Thank you for Berlin, especially early on, when your songs provided some of the musical backdrop to what was happening in East and West Germany. I still have Helden on vinyl and played it again when I heard you had died (you’ll be pleased to hear that Helden will also feature in our next Analogue Music Club in the Pilot pub in Penarth later this month). Some may associate David Hasselhoff with the fall of the wall and reunification; but many Germans probably wish that time had taken a cigarette and put it in Mr Hasselhoff’s mouth around that time, rather than hear I’ve been looking for freedom endlessly on the radio. For me that time in our history is sound tracked by ‘Heroes’.
Thanks also on behalf of my friend Ifan, who went to one of your gigs in Cardiff. His sister Haf was on the doors that night and I heard a rumour that Ifan managed to sneak in for free (he says sorry!). You gave him and his mate a wave from the stage which will remain in his memory forever.
Thank you for Lazarus and Blackstar. I am a palliative care doctor, and what you have done in the time surrounding your death has had a profound effect on me and many people I work with. Your album is strewn with references, hints and allusions. As always, you don’t make interpretation all that easy, but perhaps that isn’t the point. I have often heard how meticulous you were in your life. For me, the fact that your gentle death at home coincided so closely with the release of your album, with its good-bye message, in my mind is unlikely to be coincidence. All of this was carefully planned, to become a work of death art. The video of Lazarus is very deep and many of the scenes will mean different things to us all; for me it is about dealing with the past when you are faced with inevitable death.
Your death at home. Many people I talk to as part of my job think that death predominantly happens in hospitals, in very clinical settings, but I presume you chose home and planned this in some detail. This is one of our aims in palliative care, and your ability to achieve this may mean that others will see it as an option they would like fulfilled. The photos that emerged of you some days after your death, were said to be from the last weeks of your life. I do not know whether this is correct, but I am certain that many of us would like to carry off a sharp suit in the same way that you did in those photos. You looked great, as always, and it seemed in direct defiance of all the scary monsters that the last weeks of life can be associated with.
For your symptom control needs, you will presumably have had palliative care professionals advise on pain, nausea, vomiting, breathlessness, and I can imagine they did this well. I envisage that they also discussed any emotional anguish you may have had.
For your advance care planning (i.e. planning health and care decisions ahead of things getting worse and before becoming unable to express them), I am certain you will have had a lot of ideas, expectations, prior decisions and stipulations. These may have been set out clearly in writing, near your bed at home, so that everyone who met you was clear on what you wanted, regardless of your ability to communicate. It is an area not just palliative care professionals, but in fact all healthcare workers want to provide and improve, so that it is less likely that any sudden health incidents will automatically result in a blue-light ambulance emergency room admission. Especially when people become unable to speak for themselves.
And I doubt that anyone will have given you Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) in the last hours/days of your life, or even considered it. Regre
ttably, some patients who have not actively opted out of this treatment still receive it, by default. It involves physical, sometimes bone-breaking chest compressions, electric shocks, injections and insertion of airways and is only successful in 1–2% of patients whose cancer has spread to other organs in their body. It is very likely that you asked your medical team to issue you with a Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation order. This is something we try to offer here in Wales, as part of the Talk CPR campaign for people with palliative illness. I can only imagine what it must have been like to discuss this, but you were once again a hero, or a ‘Held’, even at this most challenging time of your life.
And the professionals who saw you will have had good knowledge and skill in the provision of palliative and end-of-life care. Sadly, this essential part of training is not always available for junior healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses, and is sometimes overlooked or under-prioritized by those who plan their education. I think if you were ever to return (as Lazarus did), you would be a firm advocate for good palliative care training being available everywhere.
So back to the conversation I had with the lady who had recently received the news that she had advanced cancer that had spread, and that she would probably not live much longer than a year or so. She talked about you and loved your music, but for some reason was not impressed by your Ziggy Stardust outfit (she was not sure whether you were a boy or a girl). She too, had memories of places and events for which you provided an idiosyncratic soundtrack. And then we talked about a good death, the dying moments and what these typically look like. And we talked about palliative care and how it can help. She told me about her mother’s and her father’s death, and that she wanted to be at home when things progressed, not in a hospital or emergency room, but that she’d happily transfer to the local hospice should her symptoms be too challenging to treat at home.
We both wondered who may have been around you when you took your last breath and whether anyone was holding your hand. I believe this was an aspect of the vision she had of her own dying moments that was of utmost importance to her, and you gave her a way of expressing this most personal longing to me, a relative stranger.
Thank you.
‘THANK YOU FOR LAZARUS AND BLACKSTAR. I AM A PALLIATIVE CARE DOCTOR, AND WHAT YOU HAVE DONE IN THE TIME SURROUNDING YOUR DEATH HAS HAD A PROFOUND EFFECT ON ME AND MANY PEOPLE I WORK WITH.’
– Dr Mark Taubert
LETTER 06
THE GREATEST MUSICAL PLEASURE I HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED
Charles Baudelaire to Richard Wagner
17 February 1860
In 1849, as a result of his political activism, German composer Richard Wagner was forced to flee his country of birth and live in Switzerland, Venice and then France. In total, he remained in exile for thirteen years. It was during this period of uncertainty, shortly before he returned to Germany, that Wagner conducted a number of concerts at a Parisian theatre known as the Salle Ventadour. One member of the audience who was particularly taken with the shows, despite having been previously unfamiliar with Wagner’s work, was noted French poet Charles Baudelaire. In fact, he was so impressed by what he deemed ‘the greatest musical pleasure [he had] ever experienced’ that a few days after the last performance he wrote Wagner a letter.
THE LETTER
Dear Sir:
I have always imagined that however used to fame a great artist may be, he cannot be insensible to a sincere compliment, especially when that compliment is like a cry of gratitude; and finally that this cry could acquire a singular kind of value when it came from a Frenchman, which is to say from a man little disposed to be enthusiastic, and born, moreover, in a country where people hardly understand painting and poetry any better than they do music. First of all, I want to tell you that I owe you the greatest musical pleasure I have ever experienced. I have reached an age when one no longer makes it a pastime to write letters to celebrities, and I should have hesitated a long time before writing to express my admiration for you, if I did not daily come across shameless and ridiculous articles in which every effort is made to libel your genius. You are not the first man, sir, about whom I have suffered and blushed for my country. At length indignation impelled me to give you an earnest of my gratitude; I said to myself, “I want to stand out from all those imbeciles.”
The first time I went to the Italian Theatre in order to hear your works, I was rather unfavorably disposed and indeed, I must admit, full of nasty prejudices, but I have an excuse: I have been so often duped; I have heard so much music by pretentious charlatans. But you conquered me at once. What I felt is beyond description, and if you will be kind enough not to laugh, I shall try to interpret it for you. At the outset it seemed to me that I knew this new music, and later, on thinking it over, I understood whence came this mirage; it seemed to me that this music was mine, and I recognized it in the way that any man recognizes the things he is destined to love. To anybody but an intelligent man, this statement would be immensely ridiculous, especially when it comes from one who, like me, does not know music, and whose whole education consists in having heard (most pleasurably, to be sure) some few fine pieces by Weber and Beethoven.
Next, the thing that struck me the most was the character of grandeur. It depicts what is grand and incites to grandeur. Throughout your works I found again the solemnity of the grand sounds of Nature in her grandest aspects, as well as the solemnity of the grand passions of man. One feels immediately carried away and dominated. One of the strangest pieces, which indeed gave me a new musical sensation, is the one intended to depict a religious ecstasy. The effect produced by the Entrance of the Guests and the Wedding Fête is tremendous. I felt in it all the majesty of a larger life than ours. Another thing: quite often I experienced a sensation of a rather bizarre nature, which was the pride and the joy of understanding, of letting myself be penetrated and invaded – a really sensual delight that resembles that of rising in the air or tossing upon the sea. And the music at the same time would now and then resound with the pride of life. Generally these profound harmonies seemed to me like those stimulants that quicken the pulse of the imagination. Finally, and I entreat you not to laugh, I also felt sensations which probably derive from my own turn of mind and my most frequent concerns. There is everywhere something rapt and enthralling, something aspiring to mount higher, something excessive and superlative. For example, if I may make analogies with painting, let me suppose I have before me a vast expanse of dark red. If this red stands for passion, I see it gradually passing through all the transitions of red and pink to the incandescent glow of a furnace. It would seem difficult, impossible even, to reach anything more glowing; and yet a last fuse comes and traces a whiter streak on the white of the background. This will signify, if you will, the supreme utterance of a soul at its highest paroxysm.
I had begun to write a few meditations on the pieces from Tannhäuser and Lohengrin that we listened to; but soon saw the impossibility of saying everything. Similarly, this letter could go on interminably. If you have been able to read it through, I thank you. It only remains for me to add a few words. From the day when I heard your music, I have said to myself endlessly, and especially at bad times, “If I only could hear a little Wagner tonight!” There are doubtless other men constituted like myself. After all, you must have been pleased with the public, whose instinct proved far superior to the false science of the journalists. Why not give us a few more concerts, adding some new pieces? You have given us a foretaste of new delights – have you the right to withhold the rest? Once again, sir, I thank you; you brought me back to myself and to what is great, in some unhappy moments.
Ch. Baudelaire
I do not set down my address because you might think I wanted something from you.
‘I HAVE HEARD SO MUCH MUSIC BY PRETENTIOUS CHARLATANS. BUT YOU CONQUERED ME AT ONCE.’
– Charles Baudelaire
LETTER 07
I HAVE TWO HANDICAPS
Florence Pric
e to Serge Koussevitzky
5 July 1943
Florence Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, and by the tender age of four, guided by her mother, who was a music teacher, she had played her first piano recital. Her love of all things musical only intensified with time, and by adulthood she was immersed in the overwhelmingly white and male world of classical music. In 1933, despite her race and gender, Price made history when her piece, Symphony in E Minor, became the first composition written by an African-American woman to be played not only by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but any major orchestra. Frustratingly, this was not the norm, and Price spent much of her career proactively searching for a route through to audiences. In 1943 she wrote to Serge Koussevitzky, the revered conductor who led the Boston Symphony Orchestra for twenty-five years, and asked him to consider using one of her scores. In this instance, as with many, her plea fell on deaf ears.
THE LETTER
My dear Dr. Koussevitzky,
To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.