A long-held (and almost completely unchallenged) assertion of philosophy is that it prepares one to meet death with equanimity. Socrates and Seneca taught that we should not fear death, that we can overcome the dread of it by keeping it constantly in our thoughts. I have never been persuaded by this. The great popularizer of this idea was Montaigne. Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) was a French nobleman who, at the age of thirty-eight, withdrew from public life and spent the remaining twenty years of his life reading, thinking and writing what he called ‘essays’. He is usually credited with inventing this literary form. His essays were like nothing that had ever been written before: highly personal, speculative, uninhibited, discursive and inspired by his reading of the great classical authors. His parents had engaged a Latin tutor for Montaigne, who spoke the language fluently before he could converse in his native French. He was thus deeply influenced by the writings and examples of Cicero, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.
The young Montaigne had a busy career as a magistrate, civil servant and diplomat. He was obsessed by death: as a young man, he lost his friend and soulmate, Étienne de la Boétie (who died of plague), and six years later his younger brother Arnaud died after a freak accident (a brain haemorrhage caused by a blow to the head from a tennis ball). Of his six children, only one survived into adulthood. Montaigne resolved to adopt the Stoic approach to death; his famous essay ‘To philosophize is to learn how to die’ borrowed its title from Cicero, who in turn, borrowed it from Socrates. The Stoics taught that we should face the inevitable with courage, resignation and lack of fuss. Fate cannot be controlled, but one’s attitude to events, including death, can: ‘At every moment let us picture it in our imagination in all its aspects. At the stumbling of a horse, the fall of a tile, the slightest pin prick, let us promptly chew on this: Well, what if it were death itself?’
But Montaigne was forced to re-examine his beliefs after a dramatic incident which occurred when he was thirty-six. He was thrown from his horse, and sustained serious injuries. Lying in a semi-conscious state, Montaigne was surprised to find himself experiencing no fear or pain. He was convinced that he would die yet felt completely at peace: ‘in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep’. Miraculously, Montaigne survived and had a slow and painful recovery. This event completely changed his attitude to death: ‘If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.’ Sarah Bakewell, in her biography of Montaigne, How to Live (2010) wrote: ‘“Don’t worry about death” became his most fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live. It made it possible to do just that: live.’
Do philosophers, and those writers (such as Tolstoy) who write about death, die any better than their less contemplative brethren? My rather banal conclusion is this: some philosophers die well, some die badly; they appear to have no particular advantage over non- philosophers.
Montaigne maintained, purely on the basis of his own near-death experience, that dying is easy, and convinced himself for the remainder of his life that death was not to be feared. This was a neat psychological trick, but if accounts of his demise are accurate, it was not at all easy, although he did it bravely. He died of quinsy, or peritonsillar abscess, at the age of fifty-nine. He had previously expressed the wish that he would die while ‘planting cabbages’. It was not to be. He died slowly and painfully, over several days, propped up in bed. He struggled for breath, and his entire body was grotesquely swollen. In one of his essays, Montaigne had written that the most horrible death would be to have one’s tongue cut out, to be without the power of speech. His illness did just that.
His was the typical public death described by Philippe Ariès: Montaigne’s family, servants and priest were in attendance. Having written his will, Montaigne, although not an especially devout man, had a last mass said in his room. He died during this mass, probably of suffocation, as the abscess slowly closed off his windpipe. This was precisely the kind of death he had hoped to avoid:
...the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror round about us; we seem dead and buried already...
The painter Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury depicted Montaigne’s death in Les derniers moments de Montaigne (1853). The canvas shows those very ‘terrible ceremonies and preparations’, right down to the dark room and the pale and blubbering servants. Montaigne has left us many well-polished phrases about not fearing death, but his philosophizing did not prevent him from having the type of death he expressly wished to avoid.
Montaigne tells us little of practical value about dying, because dying in sixteenth-century France was so different to what we experience now. Dying in old age was unusual in Montaigne’s day, but now it is the norm.
Some philosophers, such as Hume and Wittgenstein, do indeed die a ‘philosopher’s death’. Others, like Albert Camus (1913-60), died in character: he was killed in a car crash, having ditched plans to make the journey by train. The unused train ticket was found in his coat-pocket. He had once remarked that he couldn’t imagine a more meaningless death than dying in a car accident. ‘So Camus died in a car with a train ticket in his pocket,’ wrote Michael Foley in The Age of Absurdity, ‘an absurdist parable on the consequences of accepting someone else’s route.’
David Hume (1711–76), the great Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and historian, was, by universal consent, the most even-tempered and agreeable of men. Jules Evans, in Philosophy for Life (2012), recounts the story of his death:
In his sixties, after a long and distinguished career as an essayist, historian and philosopher, Hume fell ill with a disorder of the bowels that was probably cancer. His friend, the philosopher Adam Smith, tells us that Hume initially fought the disease. But the symptoms returned, and ‘from that moment he gave up all thoughts of recovery, but submitted with the utmost cheerfulness, and the most perfect complacency and resignation’ to his death.
Hume’s final illness lasted long enough – sixteen months – for him to write a brief autobiography, My Own Life:
I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits; insomuch, that were I to name the period of my life, which I should most choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this later period.
Hume was an atheist and believed that death meant extinction. He was not, however, an evangelical unbeliever in the Richard Dawkins mode; indeed, like Gibbon, he thought that one should maintain the religious proprieties, particularly when dealing with women and servants. Thomas Boswell visited him near the end, and was perplexed by Hume’s equanimity: ‘I asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least, no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes.’
The bioethicist Franklin G. Miller contrasted Hume’s death with that of Christopher Hitchens. They were of a similar age when they died (Hume was sixty-five and Hitchens sixty-two) and had a similar interval between the onset of sickness and death (sixteen months and nineteen months respectively). Both believed that death meant oblivion. Because medicine in Hume’s day had so little to offer, he spent this sixteen months writing his autobiography, and ‘was exposed to none of the rigors and distressing side-effects of disease-fighting interventions’. Hitchens’s nineteen months, as we have seen, were spent in ‘Tumortown’. ‘It is much more difficult today’, concluded Miller, ‘to achieve the tranquillity of Hume in facing death from cancer.’
Hume’s calm deportment in the face of death is matched only by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). In The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008), Simon Critchley tells the story of his final months:
After he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, news that he apparently greeted with much relief, Wittgenstein moved in with Dr and Mrs Bevan... In the remaining two months of his life, he wrote the entire second half of the manuscript that was published as On Certainty... He had developed a friendship with Mrs Bevan; they would go to the pub together every evening at six o’clock where she would drink port and Wittgenstein would empty his glass into the aspidistra plant. She presented him with an electric blanket on his birthday and said, ‘Many happy returns.’ Wittgenstein replied, staring back at her, ‘There will be no returns.’ Mrs Bevan stayed with Wittgenstein during the last night and when she told him that his friends would be visiting the next day, he said to her, ‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.’
Ernest Becker was visited in hospital before his death by the philosopher Sam Keen:
The first words Ernest Becker said to me when I walked into his hospital room were: ‘You are catching me in extremis. This is a test of everything I’ve written about death. And I’ve got a chance to show how one dies, the attitude one takes. Whether one does it in a dignified, manly way; what kind of thoughts one surrounds it with; how one accepts his death...’
Montaigne’s hero, Seneca (4 BC–AD 65), was that rare entity, a vastly wealthy Stoic philosopher. He fell foul of his former pupil, the emperor Nero, and was ordered to take his own life. He and his wife Paulina resolved to die together and used the traditional Roman method of cutting their veins and soaking in a bath. This didn’t work, because the veins stopped bleeding. Seneca eventually died from suffocation in a steam bath. The whole episode was grisly, messy and protracted; hardly the dignified exit of a Stoic. The game and willing Paulina survived – Nero had sent orders forbidding her death, so her wounds were bandaged. She went on to live for many more years. Is there a lesson here? Perhaps if Arthur Koestler’s wife Cynthia had read about Paulina, she might not have been so enthusiastic about the death-pact with her husband. Even Seneca, with all his wisdom, experience and wealth, couldn’t carry off the classical Stoic death. His botched demise was marked more by farce than nobility.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), widely acclaimed as the wisest man of his age, lived to eighty-two, productive almost to the end. His friend, the poet Johann Peter Eckermann, wrote in Conversations of Goethe: ‘The morning after Goethe’s death, a deep desire seized me to look once again upon his earthly garment. His faithful servant, Frederick, opened for me the chamber in which he was laid out. Stretched upon his back, he reposed as if asleep; profound peace and security reigned in the features of his sublimely noble countenance.’ His doctor’s diary, however, revealed that Goethe, at the end, was ‘in the grip of a terrible fear and agitation’. Goethe’s last words were famously: ‘mehr Licht’ (‘more light’). The Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard wrote a short story, ‘Claim’, about a man who claimed at every opportunity that Goethe’s last words, were, in fact, ‘mehr nicht’ (‘no more’). For his persistence, this man was eventually incarcerated in a lunatic asylum. Goethe’s close friend, Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), fell ill with pneumonia and died. Goethe had been sick at the same time, but recovered. Schiller’s last words, in the throes of pre-terminal delirium were: ‘Ist das euer Himmel, ist das euer Hölle?’ (‘Is that your heaven, is that your hell?’) Goethe and Schiller were buried alongside each other in Weimar.
Philip Larkin dismissed the claims of both religion and philosophy:
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel...
Larkin died in hospital in Hull. Like Christopher Hitchens, he had oesophageal cancer and was in his early sixties (sixty-three). A friend visiting him the day before he died said: ‘If Philip hadn’t been drugged, he would have been raving. He was that frightened.’
The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard once told Julian Barnes that the three most death-haunted people she had known were Larkin, Kingsley Amis and John Betjeman. In his poem ‘Late-Flowering Lust’, the cuddly Poet Laureate chillingly confessed that a love affair in middle age merely served to remind him of the inevitable:
I cling to you inflamed with fear
As now you cling to me,
I feel how frail you are my dear
And wonder what will be –
A week? or twenty years remain?
And then – what kind of death?
A losing fight with frightful pain
Or a gasping fight for breath?
But the death-haunted Betjeman, in the end, was luckier than he had anticipated. He died peacefully in Treen, the house in Trebetherick, Cornwall, which he had loved so much. Betjeman’s long-time lover, Elizabeth Cavendish, wrote to a friend:
...he died on the most beautiful sunny morning with the sun streaming into the room & the French windows open & the lovely smell of the garden everywhere & Carole [Betjeman’s nurse] was holding one of his hands & me the other & he had old Archy [his teddy-bear] & Jumbo in each arm & Stanley the cat asleep on his tummy.
A. N. Wilson, in his biography of Betjeman, observed: ‘There was a perfection in his dying where he had spent so many childhood hours of happiness.’
Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) learned much about death and suffering during his five years as a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. On the hospital wards and in the slums of Lambeth (where he worked as an obstetric clerk), he witnessed many deaths, and found nothing noble about it:
I set down in my note-books, not once or twice, but in a dozen places, the facts that I had seen. I knew that suffering did not ennoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, mean, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things. It did not make them more than men; it made them less than men; and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
Although he never practised as a doctor, Maugham’s experience as a medical student formed his world-view, which was that people weren’t much good, and life was meaningless. Maugham’s own end was messy, protracted and undignified. He lived to ninety-one, but his final years were scarred by dementia and violent mood swings. Interviewed by the Daily Express on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, he said he longed for death: ‘I am drunk with the thought of it. It seems to me to offer the final and absolute freedom.’ The story is told (it may be apocryphal) that Maugham, nearing the end, summoned the philosopher A. J. Ayer to his home on the Riviera, the Villa Mauresque. He asked Ayer, a resolute atheist, to reassure him that there was no afterlife. Ayer was happy to oblige. More than twenty years later, Ayer had a near-death experience after choking on a piece of salmon. He admitted that this experience provided ‘rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness’. Ayer’s wife, Dee, told Jonathan Miller: ‘Freddie has got so much nicer since he died.’
Tolstoy (1828–1910) showed unique psychological and spiritual understanding of dying in his fiction, but his own death was undignified and unedifying. At the age of eighty-two, he finally summoned the courage to leave his wife, Sonia. Their relationship had been deteriorating for several years, not helped latterly by the constant presence at his country estate, Yasnaya Polyana, of Tolstoy’s ‘disciples’. The great novelist crept out in the dead of night, but quickly fell ill with pneumonia, and died a few days later in the station-master’s house in the railway station of the rural town of Astapovo. A swarm of journalists and cameramen descended on the little town in a media scrum; at least six doctors kept separate records of his final illness, and Tsarist spies reported back to St Petersburg.
George Orwell (1903–50) described the horrors of hospital death in his essay ‘How the Poor Die’ (1946), after a spell as a patient in the Hôpital Cochin in Paris in 1929. He died in 1950 in University College Hospital in London, having suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis for many years. In his biography of Orwell, Bernard Crick wrote that he was not aware that he was dying. At the time of his death, he was making plans to travel to a Swiss sanatorium and his main concern was the quality of the tea he might be offered there: ‘They have that filthy Chinese stuff, you know. I like Ceylon tea, very strong.’ Orwell died at night, alone, following a lung haemorrhage.
Sigmund Freud died in London in 1939, having fled Vienna the year before. Over a period of sixteen years, he had undergone over thirty operations and several courses of radiation. He was seeing patients up to two months before his death. Towards the end, Freud’s dog, a chow called Lün, could not bear to be in the same room as his master because of the stink from Freud’s necrotic tumour. His physician, Max Schur, had followed Freud to London, and kept his promise: ‘When he was again in agony, I gave him a hypodermic of two centigrams of morphine. The expression of pain and suffering was gone. I repeated the dose after about 12 hours. Freud was obviously so close to the end of his reserves that he lapsed into a coma and did not wake up again.’ At the end, Schur, as he had promised, was Freud’s amicus mortis.
The combination of virtues shown by Hume and Wittgenstein – courage, nobility, intellect and an unflinching acceptance of the truth – are rare indeed. Seneca, Goethe, Maugham and Tolstoy, for all their insight into death and dying, died themselves no better than the unlettered vulgarians. There have doubtless been many anonymous and uncelebrated folk throughout history (such as Montaigne’s peasant neighbours) who died as bravely and as nobly as Hume and Wittgenstein. Being a philosopher or a thanatologist clearly confers no special advantage. Sarah Bakewell concluded of Montaigne: ‘Philosophers find it hard to leave the world because they try to maintain control. So much for “To philosophise is to learn how to die.” Philosophy looked more like a way of teaching people to unlearn the natural skill that every peasant had as a birthright.’
So, is philosophy a waste of time, impotent to temper the terror of death? Some writers less exalted than Montaigne and Seneca may have more relevant things to say to us about death. Montaigne did not conduct interviews with the dying, but Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative care worker, did, and wrote a bestselling book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing (2012). These top five are: (1) I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me; (2) I wish I hadn’t worked so hard; (3) I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings; (4) I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends; (5) I wish I’d let myself be happier. Ware argues that our denial of death causes us to lead inauthentic lives: ‘we carry on trying to validate ourselves through our material life and associated fearful behaviour instead. If we are able to face our own inevitable death with honest acceptance, before we have reached that time, then we shift our priorities well before it is too late.’
The French psychologist Marie de Hennezel also worked for many years in palliative care, and also wrote a bestseller, called Seize the Day (2012), with the same message: ‘Death can be a door that opens to a greater awareness and a more meaningful life.’ The trick, of course, is to come to this conclusion when you are still healthy.
Julian Barnes wrote about the ‘lemon table’ at the Kämp restaurant in Helsinki, where, in the 1920s, local intellectuals, including the composer Sibelius, would gather to discuss death. The lemon was the ancient Chinese symbol of death, and those seated at this particular table were obliged to discuss this – and no other – topic.
I have my own version of the lemon table. The largest cemetery in Cork, St Finbarr’s, is a short walk from the hospital where I work. I regularly visit St Finbarr’s, usually at lunchtime, particularly when the weather is good. I started visiting the cemetery not because of any Montaignian intention to contemplate death, but because it is a restful, quiet place, ideal for a short walk in the middle of the working day. St Finbarr’s is so large that I walk only a small section at a time. There is a long, wide, tree-lined avenue, flanked by two Romanesque chapels, with several smaller, numbered, paths leading off it. The Republican plot is situated just inside the main entrance gate, and contains the graves of the local heroes, such as Tomás MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney, who died in the War of Independence. The cemetery was built in the mid-nineteenth century and initially accommodated mainly the professional and merchant classes. Many headstones proudly list the degrees and professional qualifications of the deceased. Nearly all famous Corkonians are buried in St Finbarr’s; the only notable exceptions being Michael Collins (buried in Glasnevin in Dublin) and the blues guitarist Rory Gallagher, whose plot is in the new cemetery, St Oliver’s, where my father is also buried.
My interest, however, is in the unknown, the unheroic and the neglected. Each row of headstones tells a few brief stories of heartbreak: here, the young surgeon, dead at thirty – what happened? There, the child dead at fifteen, his father joining him less than two years later. Next, the girl I knew at school, who died of leukaemia aged just seventeen. (Her mother had been to see me as a patient, and I told her that I had known his long-dead daughter. Her eyes filled with tears as I told her.) Most of the plots are tidy and well maintained; a few are neglected and overgrown, the lettering on the headstones now indecipherable. One well-kept plot commemorates a woman who died aged forty-three in 1884, ‘To the inexpressible grief of her husband and children’. Wittgenstein would have understood. The plot containing the remains of the local Franciscan monks has a headstone on which is engraved a phrase of St Francis’s: ‘Welcome, Sister Death’.
When I last visited St Finbarr’s, on a fine, windy autumn day, I heard my name called from the other side of the cemetery wall. It was K., a classmate from primary school. He was standing on a ladder, thinning a tree in a garden adjoining the cemetery. K. had started working as a landscape gardener when he was made redundant, after twenty-eight years, from his job at a local factory. I retrieved for him some of the branches that had fallen on the plots below; we talked amiably about getting older, children leaving home, and how it all went by so fast. A visit to St Finbarr’s is a reliable antidote to work-related worry; half an hour spent in the company of the dead is surprisingly soothing.
Philippe Ariès observed how, in medieval Europe, death was seen as a transition to another life. Religion, not medicine, was the guiding force: nobody expected medicine, as we do now, to cure them when they fell mortally ill. Much of our contemporary fear of death is attributable to the prevailing certainty, for most people, that death means extinction, oblivion. One would think, intuitively, that death and dying would be less terrifying for those with a strong religious faith. But I do not believe that this is so. The US, ostensibly the most God-fearing nation on earth, is also the most death-fearing. A palliative care colleague told me how commonly priests experience profound spiritual crises when they are dying. The story is told of a cardinal who, when diagnosed with terminal cancer, confided in a saintly fellow priest. The priest congratulated the cardinal and expressed some envy that he would soon be with God and his angels. This priest is presented to us as a sort of holy fool, but isn’t this exactly how a true believer should react to such news? J. G. Ballard wrote of Francis Bacon’s series of ‘pope’ paintings (inspired by Velásquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X): ‘His popes screamed because they knew there was no God.’
Unlike Bacon’s popes, my uncle – the priest – truly believed. Did his faith sustain him when he was dying? I think so. Although he was ninety and had endured a miserable year or more, he was frightened of dying. He did not fear death but, rather, dying alone. Although his supple mind was well acquainted with theology and philosophy, he had the simple, unshakeable faith of country people. He firmly believed that physical death was the portal that opened into eternal life. When it became clear that he was dying, family members took it in turns to sit with him. For the last twenty-four hours, he was semi-conscious, anaesthetized by the syringe-driver. In his final agony, he called out: ‘I want to go home.’ Home, for him, was always Dromore, the place he had left more than seventy years before. Dromore had always held for him a mystical, almost religious, fascination. Honour thy father and thy mother: he revered his parents and prayed daily that he would rejoin them in Heaven.
The eldest of his three surviving sisters, a nun, sat with him, hour after hour, and prayed. Exhausted, she was eventually persuaded by my brother to take a break and have a meal. My wife (Scottish Catholic) and sister-in-law (Bavarian Lutheran) took her place, and he died shortly after. My aunt bitterly regretted missing the moment of his death. Shortly after, the family gathered around him in the room and said the Rosary. His funeral was a lavish, public affair, which would not have shamed a head of state.
My father-in-law, too, was sustained by his faith. A few days before he died, the parish priest came to give him the Last Rites, and hear his confession. He told the priest that he didn’t want to die, but was ready.
My own generation, let down both by organized religion and frenetic materialism, does not enjoy the consolations of faith. The Ireland I grew up in was a theocracy in all but name; the Ireland I came back to in 2001 reminded me of ‘Pleasure Island’ in Disney’s Pinocchio. In the space of a generation, the power of the Catholic Church had collapsed, probably forever. Shortly after that, the chimera that was the Celtic Tiger disappeared. The resulting spiritual and moral vacuum has not been filled. Fear of death has replaced fear of God.
Medical knowledge is, or should be, a huge advantage when facing death. We know how it goes. We can decode the smooth words of the oncologist. We understand the implications of any given diagnosis. This should help – shouldn’t it? Did Kieran Sweeney’s knowledge make it any easier for him? I like to think that when faced with my own inevitable endgame, my medical knowledge will at least spare me the indignities of self-delusion and futile treatments. I wonder. A 2003 study from Johns Hopkins University examined doctors’ preferences for their own care at the end of life. Most had an advance directive. The overwhelming majority did not want cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, dialysis, major surgery or PEG feeding. They were unanimous in their enthusiasm for analgesic drugs. The uncomfortable conclusion of this study is that doctors routinely subject their patients to treatments that they wouldn’t dream of having themselves. The Kansas-based pathologist Dr Ed Friedlander proudly sports a tattoo on his chest saying ‘No CPR’.
An American doctor, Ken Murray, wrote an article called ‘How Doctors Die’ in 2011:
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. The surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year survival odds – from 5 per cent to 15 per cent – albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
Not all doctors, however, display Charlie’s matter-of-fact stoicism. A doctor acquaintance of mine, diagnosed with inoperable cancer, underwent several courses of chemotherapy, all of them complicated by horrific side effects, and believed right to the end that he would recover and return to his practice. He died on an acute medical ward, having refused to engage with the palliative care services, which he regarded as ‘throwing in the towel’.
One of my former bosses, a distinguished academic, became suddenly very sick at the age of fifty-seven. He died in hospital within a few weeks, of unsuspected pancreatic cancer. After his death, the task of clearing out his office fell to one of his colleagues. He was notoriously disorganized and untidy, but, to his colleague’s surprise, everything in the office was neatly filed. Clearly he had either known, or had a premonition of, his condition, but had told no one. The succession was easy and orderly.
*
Albert Camus thought that life was meaningless, its only consistent attribute being absurdity. Human beings torture themselves by trying to find meaning where there is none. Religion is the greatest expression of this quest for meaning. We look for meaning in everything: as children we look for patterns in clouds and paving stones. Life looks easier if it is viewed as a story with a narrative and a theme. Far from being terrified by this meaninglessness, Camus suggests that we should embrace it, because ultimately that is where freedom lies. Few of us, however, have the existential clarity and courage of Camus: having to be the author of your own script for living and dying is an intolerable burden for most modern secular people. We have fetishized choice but, like children, we long for boundaries and rules.
Death, as I have seen it, is more often marked by pain, fear, boredom and absurdity than it is by dignity, spirituality and meaning. What are we to do? Our problem with death is that, compared to our ancestors, we live so long. We know, in theory, that we must die, but we have banished death from our thoughts.