Death intrigues us. Stories of death make the front page. Murder is our worst crime.
We know death will come to us all in one form or another, but we don’t know what it’s like. And there’s no-one we can ask.
We tend to think of death as a thing, a state of being, but it’s only a point of transition. One moment we are living, the next we are dead.
So, what we mean by death is actually its effect on the living — a sense of shock or grief or relief. Of death itself and the dead themselves we still know nothing.
Recently Doug died of cancer. He was a stalwart of a local theatre group, a tireless worker and vigorous swearer. When he didn’t have long to go, the theatre group organised a party for him. I couldn’t attend, but dozens did. They came with photos and memories to say goodbye. The climax of the party was when the club secretary led the crowd in a shouted chorus of Doug’s favourite monosyllable of profanity. It was both a tribute to Doug, and a protest against his going, a fist shaken at the sky. Doug died a couple of weeks later.
It would be nice if we all got such a send-off. In Sicily I watched a coffin borne from a church followed by a long line of mourners in the heat. Before the pallbearers put the coffin in the hearse they turned and raised it high above their heads. And all the mourners clapped, which was a pretty thing to see. But it was a bit late for the mournee.
In one sense it would be good to know your date of death. You would know how long your savings had to last. And you could go out neatly, saying goodbye to some and not to others, and leaving notes for those who needed notes left. After the mess that we all make of our lives, it would lend a contrasting orderliness, in keeping with the nature of death itself. For amid the welter of incompletion and unfulfilment, death is uniquely emphatic. It puts a full stop to the sentence. The book, for better or for worse, is written. There’s no chance to revise it.
But knowing your date of death from a long way out, if it was stamped, say, on your birth certificate, would cast a long shadow. It would nag with the voice of futility. "What is the point?" the voice would whisper. "On such and such a date you’ll cease to be. Why try?" And you would find yourself echoing Macbeth, for whom all yesterdays had lighted fools the way to dusty death, and for whom life was a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Macbeth, of course, was bang right. But because we do not know our date of death his words don’t seem bang right. Not quite. We may be doomed but we don’t feel doomed. Instead, we inhabit the muddy ground of in-between, the uniquely human paradox of knowing we’re going to die but living as if we weren’t. Thus, death is both taboo and very interesting.
Those gathered seemed not to fear death much. But we did fear its slow approach. We feared worsening disability. We feared indignity. Above all we feared the onset of dementia, and the demeaning long descent into bewilderment. We’d all seen it happen to others.
None of us craved longevity, though it has become a fetish of the modern world. What we craved was a kind death. The sort of death that Sophie’s mother had.
Both Sophie’s parents were in their 80s and had celebrated that weekend their 60-somethingth wedding anniversary. There was a party, with all their children present and a flock of grandchildren.
On Monday evening Sophie came home from work, poured a glass of wine and rang her mother as she often did. Her mother sounded understandably tired, her voice thin. She said she’d have an early night.
Two hours later Sophie’s father rang. "Your mother’s died," he said, and then, "would you tell the others?" By others he meant Sophie’s siblings.
Sophie’s father had been watching a nature documentary on television. During an ad break he went up to check on his wife of 60-something years. She’d just got into bed, wearing, as she always wore, a neatly ironed nightdress. The next time he went up to see her she was dead. She’d died in sound mind and her own bed, and between ad breaks. As all agreed, a happy story.
— Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
