I’m not worried about death. There are times – when I’m arguing with members of my family, falling out with friends, watching the news or looking at Twitter – when non-existence seems rather appealing. It’s the actual dying part I’m sadder about, and since my pa died I think about it a lot more.
Mainly I wonder how it’ll come about, which makes me think of my health. In all likelihood, whatever is going to finish me off is lurking inside already; deadly sleeper cells radicalised by genetic scriptures or years of attacks from booze, biscuits and tobacco, waiting to bring down the short, hairy Tower of Buckles. I could wage war on these internal terrorists with exercise, self-control, cutting-edge diets, chanting, magnets, tea made from my own urine, etc., but even then, all it takes is a few disgruntled actors and it’s curtains for my corrupted empire.
Or maybe the universe will clobber me another way and all the time spent worrying about my health will have been wasted. Perhaps I’ll drive into a tree while attempting to pair the car stereo with my phone, or get pushed in front of a train during an argument with a rail official at Cambridge station, or the Russians will inject one of my Revels with a nerve agent, and in my last moments I’ll be thinking, ‘Oh no! I could have had way more doobies.’
One of my main worries about dying is the lack of control. Regaining a shred of autonomy is presumably one of the main factors when people consider voluntary euthanasia. Arranging the exact time and nature of your exit has a lot of advantages from the point of view of tying up loose ends. I’m not talking about suicide here, by the way. As far as I can see that just creates a lifetime’s supply of loose ends for the family and friends you leave behind. I’m talking about organising a nice farewell that eliminates the randomness, the surprise and the meaninglessness of so many deaths.
For example, when I felt the time was right, I could return to St Cuthbert’s parish church in the cathedral city of Wells, Somerset, where in 2006 Edgar Wright directed my death scene in Hot Fuzz, and here, as part of a moving ceremony, someone I’d chosen specially (an old enemy I wanted to make peace with, or a competition winner perhaps) could topple one of the church spires and explode my head, as in the film. If Simon Pegg was experiencing a career slump, he could officiate. My family would probably not attend (unless they really hated me by that time), but for film fans, gore hounds and those who appreciate grand gestures that defy the arbitrary nature of existence, it would be a day to cherish.
My dad was determined to tie up as many loose ends as possible before he died. He didn’t want us to be burdened with too much admin when he was gone. As he had no other assets to speak of, his hopes for leaving something behind for his children were pinned on selling his place in Newhaven where he’d lived by himself for his last 20 years, and he didn’t want to pop off before the sale was finalised.
The house was eventually sold a few weeks before he died but brought in a fraction of the already modest sum my dad was expecting. He went full gloomy about it, as if cancer wasn’t enough to be down in the dumps about. My sister, my brother and I never expected to inherit anything from Dad (other than some grumpy genes, a lot of books about the Second World War and various lengths of string), so we didn’t care about the money, but he took it as another indication that he’d failed somehow. In his last days his face fixed into an expression of worry. I asked if he was frightened. ‘No,’ said Pa. What was he fretting about then? ‘So many things,’ he replied.
Watching TV with my wife and Rosie one night in mid-November 2015, my phone rang. It was Dad calling from his bedroom across the way. ‘Adam? Something extraordinary’s happened.’
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know who I am,’ replied Pa.
My chest elevator dropped a few floors. I had been so focused on Dad’s physical deterioration, I hadn’t considered what might be happening to his mind.
Over in the flat I found him sitting up in bed looking worried. ‘It’s the strangest thing,’ he said, all the hardness gone out of his voice. ‘I woke up and I no longer had any sense of who I am.’ I went and fetched a family photo album and found that he was able to recognise and identify everyone in it, so the problem wasn’t with his memory. Instead, it was his sense of self that had short-circuited. It reminded me of my Warwick magic-mushroom experience and the clone I’d seen in the mirror. ‘I bet you this is a side-effect of the morphine,’ speculated Dr A. Buckles.
We went and sat in the living room. I made some tea and set it down for Dad with a couple of milk chocolate Hobnobs, hoping to refocus his mind on a simple pleasure. ‘Have you ever dunked a biscuit?’ I asked, prepared for him to tell me that dunking biscuits was vulgar, barbaric or grotesque.
‘Of course I’ve dunked a biscuit,’ he replied.
Dad dunked his Hobnob in the tea and for a moment I worried that he would fail to take it out before the submerged portion detached and sank, but luckily he withdrew it before it came to that. ‘It’s great to dunk a biscuit, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ replied Pa softly before continuing, as if to himself, ‘Occasionally I feel that I’m absolutely irrelevant.’
OK. Time to shift to a conversational gear I hadn’t used with Dad before.
‘Who is relevant?’ I asked.
‘Ah, that’s the big question,’ said Dad, still not really looking at me. ‘That is where it starts to be frightening.’
‘Why would you be frightened by it?’
‘Because we spend so much time and effort making sure that the state of our being is what it ought to be, and it becomes very unsettling if you start suspecting that it doesn’t very much matter.’
‘Well, it doesn’t much matter. But that’s why we make things and organise things, isn’t it? Otherwise, of course it’s all meaningless.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked after a while.
‘I feel much better now,’ said Dad weakly, ‘but only because you’re there.’
I didn’t like to see him vulnerable and frightened. On the other hand, it was preferable to seeing him crotchety and impatient. At least I felt I could be of some use to him when he was in this state. Then he asked, ‘What have you done with the black briefcase?’ I told him it was safe. ‘Do you know what’s in it?’
I did know what was in it.
Several weeks earlier I’d complained to Dad about his commandeering of salad bowls for use as piss bottles (ignoring the carefully-washed fabric softener containers I’d provided for just such a purpose), and the conversation had escalated until he’d snapped, ‘Perhaps it would be best for everyone if you just put me in a home then.’ I said I’d look into it. Sat at my desk trying to regain my composure, my gaze drifted from the browser window where I had typed ‘Norwich best care homes’ to the black briefcase on the corner filing cabinet. ‘Screw it,’ I thought. ‘I’m going to take a look.’
It wasn’t hard to get it open. I forced the catches with a screwdriver and they flipped up perkily as if to say, ‘Hey! What took you so long?’
There was a gun inside. A Luger.
‘It belonged to an SS officer,’ said Dad, and I dunked a Hobnob. ‘I took it off him when we liberated a POW camp on the outskirts of Hamburg. You would have known if you’d read my book.’
Copies of The Road to Fleet Street, the autobiography Dad had been working on in various forms for years and had finished just a couple of months before, had recently arrived in Norfolk, but between family, failed pilots and Dad commitments, there hadn’t been the time to sit down and read it all. Also, at that point, I just couldn’t face it. There were so many things I wanted to know about Dad, but, leafing through the book, I could see he hadn’t written about them. As for what he had written about, I felt I’d heard most of those stories before. Maybe not the Luger story, though.
‘I was thinking,’ continued Dad, ‘I might ask you to bring me the gun and I could just blow my brains out.’
I replied that I’d rather he didn’t blow his brains out. Clearing up after the spectacular Code Brown in the bathroom last week had been bad enough. Dad ignored me and continued, ‘I think the reason people shoot themselves is that they don’t belong anywhere. They don’t have any reason to be anywhere.’
‘Or they’ve made such a mess of things they can’t bear to think about it any more. Or they’re mentally ill, but that’s not the case with you, Dad.’
‘The case with me is, I have no relevance. If it weren’t for the fact that there would be a response from you, I wouldn’t speak. Because that would remind me that I was the only person left in the world and that would remind me that I didn’t exist.’
I asked him if he felt panicky. ‘Of course. I’m panicky because I don’t belong anywhere.’
‘You belong here,’ I said, and for a while neither of us spoke.
When I was confident that he was OK and through the worst of the morphine fugue, I asked if he’d like me to put on a film for him. ‘What would you put on?’ he asked. I tried to think what I would want to watch if I were in his position. ‘Have you seen Air Force One with Harrison Ford?’ Dad liked Harrison Ford. We watched Raiders of the Lost Ark one Christmas towards the end of the Eighties when Dad was beginning work on his novel, The Proving Ground. ‘That’s who should play me when they turn my book into a film,’ said Dad. I put on Air Force One and headed back to Rosie and my wife.
After Pa’s bad trip he made me promise I wouldn’t let him wake up in the night feeling like that again. I told him if he took his sleeping pill every night, he should be fine, but that was easier said than done.
He’d stopped eating solid food by this point and was only drinking fluids with difficulty – an indication, said the GP, that the end was a few days away. His sleeping pills were tiny but getting one into his mouth and washing it down with some water had become like a Mission Impossible interrogation scene.
At the end of one particularly difficult day when I was looking forward to a beer, a podcast and a few hours of undisturbed rest, I placed the pill in Dad’s mouth and offered him a glass of water to wash it down. He waved it away. ‘Have you swallowed the pill?’ I asked hopefully.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied after a while.
‘Well, have you or haven’t you?’ Pa opened his mouth and the pill fell out.
There followed around ten minutes of unsuccessful attempts to shift him into a position where he could more easily swallow the pill, every move accompanied by more of his blood-curdling groans and cries. It felt as though he was no longer helping me, even actively resisting my efforts to help him swallow the pill, but I refused to give in, reasoning that once it was down we could both get some undisturbed rest. After all, neither of us wanted a repeat of Lugernacht.
Exhausted and agitated, I was ready to throw up my hands and say, ‘Sod this, I give up,’ when I remembered the heavy little shot glasses I kept as souvenirs from my bartending days.
RAMBLE
I liked it when Dad would come into the bar while I was working. With a nod from my manager, I’d pour us a couple of shots of the most expensive Armagnac we had and Pa would beam at me. ‘Golly, this is the really fancy stuff! I had a flask of this when I walked the Chilkoot Trail in Alaska and it saved my life on more than one occasion, let me tell you.’ He had told me many times.
I crushed the sleeping pill into a powder and transferred it to the shot glass, which I topped up with water. Back in Dad’s bedroom, I tipped back his skinny head and supported it as I lifted the glass to his lips and poured in the sleeping draught.
Once it was finally all gone, I told Dad I was heading to bed myself and wished him a good night. As I turned to leave, he murmured something I couldn’t understand, except for the phrase ‘sleep tonight with a clear conscience’.
‘What’s that, Daddy? Are you saying you don’t have a clear conscience?’
To which he replied clearly, ‘No, you!’
‘Why wouldn’t I have a clear conscience?’ I asked, my heart beginning to thump.
‘Because you’re a bully.’
I considered this for a few moments, wondering if he might be right, thinking about times I’d been impatient with him, with the children, with my wife, with Rosie, thinking about all the ways there are to be a bully even if you think you’re a good guy, a loyal son, a FUN DAD.
Then I thought, ‘No, fuck that,’ and said, ‘Daddy, I am doing my best to keep you out of hospital and look after you here, as you said you wanted. You asked me not to let you wake up in the night again, which is why you need to take the sleeping pill. Now you call me a bully?’
A short pause, then he mumbled, ‘I take it all back.’
‘Hmmm. OK,’ I said. ‘Well, see you tomorrow.’
RAMBLE
Why am I telling you all this stuff? I suppose a selfish impulse to unburden myself is part of it, but people sometimes tell me they find it helpful when I discuss this kind of thing on the podcast, so I thought I shouldn’t shy away from it here. Dad felt this sort of talk cheapened moments that were meant to be kept private or sacred. Maybe he was right.
Maybe I’ll regret writing about all this one day. But for the time being all I can do is try to connect.
Dad didn’t say much the day he died. I was sitting by his bed, still hoping he might rally sufficiently to deliver an inspiring farewell speech, have a crack at the meaning of life or just say, ‘I thought your song “Sausages” was very good.’ Instead, he drifted in and out of lucidity, occasionally gripping my hand softly or raising his rheumy eyes to meet mine, but obstinately refusing to get cinematic.
By the time the district nurses arrived to hook up an automatic syringe drive for his painkillers, he was no longer gripping my hand, there was a thousand-yard stare on him and his breathing sounded like a fucked coffee percolator.
‘He should calm down a bit when the painkillers take effect,’ said one of the nurses as they left, but half an hour passed and his chest was rattling so much it was freaking me out. I went into the living room and to distract myself I started playing a game on my phone, a Tetris variant based on numbers that I often played before bed while listening to a podcast to wind my brain down.
I jabbed away for a minute or two, then thought, ‘Shit! I wouldn’t want my dad to die while I was playing a phone game.’ I went back in to find his breathing had become more jerky. I held his hand, called out to him, but he didn’t register me. Now there were long pauses between sharp intakes of breath. ‘Hey, Daddy! Can you hear me? I’m right here.’ Then his face contorted and a single tear ran down his left cheek. Then he stopped breathing.
‘Hey, Daddy!’ I said for several minutes. ‘Where are you? Are you there? Where are you?’ Worth a try.
Earlier that day, just when I thought he had zoned out completely, Dad slowly reached out his arm, took my hand and brought it to his face. ‘He probably wants me to wipe his mouth or scratch his ear or something,’ I thought, but to my surprise he gave my hand a kiss. ‘Oh shit!’ I thought. ‘This is it. Cinematic closure time!’
It didn’t look as though he was going to die at that very moment, so I asked if he’d like me to read to him and looked over at the shelves filled with all the books that had made the trip from Newhaven earlier in the year. Dad gave me a trembling thumbs up. ‘How about this one?’ I said, picking out Master and Commander from a row filled with all the volumes in the same series by Patrick O’Brian. I remembered that Dad had once tried reading Master and Commander to me when I was very young, but I thought it was boring. I preferred the Mister Men books, which must have been painful for Dad, like one of my children turning their nose up at David Bowie only to get excited about Justin Bieber. I held up Master and Commander for Dad and he gave me another thumbs up.
As soon as I began to read, the moment felt over-burdened with significance. I tried my best to give the audiobook performance of a lifetime, but within a few lines I stumbled on some nautical jargon, and when I mispronounced the name ‘Maturin’ as ‘Maturing’, Dad waved his hand emphatically for me to stop. I apologised and asked if he wanted me to continue. Feebly, he reached across and pushed the book out of my hands. I’d failed the audition for my own Moving Moment with Dying Dad scene, but, I reminded myself, he’d kissed my hand. That wasn’t nothing.
It’s supposed to be therapeutic to write a letter to a dead loved one, so here goes:
Dear Daddy,
How are you? I am fine. What’s it like being dead (assuming it’s anything at all)? I bet it’s relaxing, like the feeling you get after cancelling a load of appointments and doing all your admin. Are there a lot of people playing phone games there?
Or maybe the afterlife is a perfect moment made eternal, like the Nexus in Star Trek: Generations (except without Whoopi Goldberg with a small coffee table on her head, trying to convince you to leave). If it’s like the Nexus, I imagine you’re sat on a picnic blanket outside a little log cabin on a snowy hillside somewhere in the Tyrol. There’s a bottle of Moët chilling in the snow and you’re with that ballet dancer who broke your heart before you met Mum. You remember? The one you would mention more often than you probably ought to have done.
Things are OK in Norfolk. Every few weeks Rosie and I walk over to visit your grave and make sure it’s all in order. We don’t want BaaadDad fans to cover it with graffiti, love locks, stickers, friendship bracelets and other trinkets, the way they did with Jim Morrison. None so far, you’ll be relieved to hear. At Christmas I pour some Courvoisier down for you, but Rosie usually licks it up. It was good to see you and Rosie getting along in those final months, cos when we were little you used to be a real Dog Nazi, remember?
Sometimes I chat to your headstone and Rosie looks at me as if to say, ‘You know he’s dead and ghosts don’t exist, don’t you?’ You certainly haven’t sent me any ghostly signs since you’ve been gone, so I think she’s probably right. If you were a ghost, I imagine you’d possess my laptop and start leaving comments about my bad grammar and striking through sentences you didn’t like. And pretty much the whole of this last chapter would be out. I’d have to upgrade to the latest operating system to get rid of you, which I don’t want to do because I’m worried it would affect the functionality of too many applications I rely on for BUG and the podcast.
I know we didn’t have that much of a relationship in the last 20 years, but I wanted you to know, I thought you were the best when I was growing up. Funny and nice and clever and important. Remember when we went to New York and you said you’d forgotten to lock the safe where you kept all your expensive cameras, fancy bottles of wine and other priceless treasure?You decided to fly back to London on Concorde, lock the safe, then get the next Concorde back to New York the same day. We all thought that was pretty cool at the time. Now it seems to be the work of a madman, but it contributed to that feeling we had as children that as long as you were around, everything could be sorted and everything would be OK.
What a great feeling that was. I’m lucky to have had it, and I was always grateful for it, even when I eventually found out it wasn’t real and you were as flawed as the rest of us. Even when you seemed disappointed by how everything turned out, even when you used to wear very short shorts and sit on your camping stool with your legs apart, so that one of your saggy old nuts popped out. Even then.
I do miss that feeling. I sometimes feel frightened since you left. Frightened I’m doing a bad job of bringing up my children, frightened I’m too weak-willed to be a better person and frightened of deteriorating and dying fretful. But that’s just sometimes. Most of the time I’m all-round amazing – at least, that’s what Rosie thinks. For example, I’ve been cooking some vegan and vegetarian meals. They’re much nicer than I thought they would be, although it has meant I feel justified eating more cakes and biscuits. Also, I read a lot more books nowadays, though you’d probably think they were shit. There’s other amazing stuff, but that’s all that comes to mind just now.
Perhaps when I’m lying in my deathbed, I’ll get one of my children to read to me, the way I did with you, remember? I won’t ask them to read Master and Commander, though. They can read from Ramble Book by Adam Buxton. I hear it’s great for deathbeds.
Anyway, thanks, Daddy. I love you. Bye.
Adam