I know one thing: life is to be taken seriously but the moment you take yourself too seriously, you are screwed.
However, I can’t lie, I don’t want stoicism, I want tears. At my funeral. Even more at my memorial service. Bawling, wailing and weeping. European-style, collapsing-on-the-floor lamentation. As a director, I can make that happen. That’s the game I’m in. The manipulation game. And in my experience, the best way to make sure people weep uncontrollably is to make them laugh first and then sock them with the sad stuff. They are loosened up and ready to wail!
So you see, I couldn’t just die and let someone else plan my memorial service.
I am fully aware that a lot of you will wince every time I talk about the possibility of death but it’s the reality of that particular situation. The doctor gave me a 70 per cent chance of survival. Ergo there was a 30 per cent chance of me not surviving.
The definition of not surviving is dying.
And, more to the point, those odds give you licence to think about what might happen if you do die without actually thinking you will die.
The other reason I can talk about it is that I didn’t die. You may have noticed. There may well be a Poirot-type twist at the end of this book, but somehow I think that’s unlikely.
The fact is that I did plan my own memorial service. I couldn’t resist it. It was a wonderfully morbid and camp thing to do. And I loved it. That’s the point. I had a damn good time doing it. And I didn’t do it with ‘woe is me’ tears streaming down my face. The act of planning my own memorial service felt fun and naughty and liberating. And it was a welcome distraction to the mayhem going on inside me.
Plus, the reality of it all is this:
I never thought I would die but I often thought ‘what if I did?’ and I enjoyed being given guilt-free licence to think such morbid thoughts. A free pass to romanticising my own death. And I devoured it. It was my number one pastime. If you start talking to other people about it, they get uncomfortable because all they see is your death and they find it sad and upsetting that you might be contemplating it. So I chose to keep it to myself.
In truth I found it replenishing. To think about it. To write it down, even. I found glory in going to the edge of the mountaintop. I found glory in the romantic notion of people sobbing uncontrollably at my funeral and again at my memorial service.
Death and the Elephant creep silently into the room. You can try to ignore the Elephant but you know it’s there, squeezed next to your cancer-infested body. Its trunk is playing havoc with your packed lunch. This is the first time that you are faced with the big question. Death.
What do I do? Do I try to ignore it? If I try to ignore it, the elephant rumbles and rumbles and rumbles. And that’s not healthy. It’s not healthy at all. It’s a complete throbbing mind fuck.
Every time you even glance away, its leathery grey skin pushes hard against you and lets out a deep hard trumpeting rumble.
‘D-E-A-T-H.’
‘D-E-A-T-H.’
‘D-E-A-T-H.’
‘D-E-A-T-H.’
There’s only one thing you can say:
‘Elephant (Death), I know you’re in here, I know you’re close by. I know you could crush me at any moment. But Elephant (Death), I am going to acknowledge you. More than that, Elephant (Death), I am going to get so close to you that I can hear your call. I like knowing you’re nearby. I like myself when I know that I am not ignoring you. Not ignoring the possibility of you. That keeps me alert. Keeps me real. Keeps me feeling like I am living in the now rather than running away. It makes Death (Elephant) seem tame or tamed.’
First embrace the darkness. The only way after that is towards the light. The more head-on you can face it, the more you can stare it down, the easier it is to live with and the more likely it is to retreat.
In other words, if we acknowledge death and its potential and possibilities, we are minimising the Elephant and taking the fear of the unknown and the unspoken out of the equation.
It absolutely doesn’t mean I thought I was going to die; it purely meant that I could think about death in a slightly abstract and more ‘fun’ way. Hence the joy to be had in planning my memorial service. That planning made me feel like Richard Burton at Cannes. It is glamour laced with a little bit of darkness. And that’s a heady mix. And if Richard Burton is death, then Liz Taylor must be life.
And that’s quite a life.
I’ll settle for that.