A Beginner’s Guide to Dying
Simon Boas
Having read it
★★★★☆
Full of life in its clarity, honesty and acceptance and the deceny, mistakes, difficulties, goodness, realities and possibilities of living.
A thoroughly decent short read with some helpful suggestions and a fair bit of humour.
It’s quite a cliché, isn’t it, to get terminal cancer and then suddenly to start believing in a creator and an afterlife? It’s a bit on a par with that Second World War saying that ‘there are no atheists in foxholes’. Some late money for Pascal’s Wager (though of all the French theological bet-hedging I prefer Voltaire’s, who when asked on his deathbed whether he renounced the Devil responded that now was no time to be making enemies). I could plead that I’d actually reached most of the conclusions below a few years before my throat decided to take revenge for all the crap I’d poured down it, but actually, so what?
A good passage
At 46, I have lived far longer than most of the humans in the 300,000-year history of our species. So have you, probably. And if the book of my life is shorter than many modern people’s, it doesn’t make it any less of a good read. Length and quality are not correlated in lives any more than they are in novels or films. So carpe that diem and keep it carped. And enjoy the tiny ways you can make other people a little happier. That’s actually the secret of being happy oneself.
A second good passage
Death is a natural part of life, and the more we understand that, the more we can enjoy living.
A third good passage
Don’t minimise things – However flippant I might be about my fate, be very careful about mirroring it. Just as certain words can now only be used by those they once were used against, dark humour is the preserve of the dying and not of the comforting. I might make jokes about ‘Indignitas’ (the euthanasia clinic where they push you out of the window wearing a clown suit), or about wanting my ashes tossed into the eyes of a peloton of cyclists, but you probably shouldn’t, even if you know me really well.
Also, avoid any sentence which starts with ‘at least’. I’ve had some corkers, and am lucky they amuse me, but dying people don’t want to hear that at least they’ll avoid the indignities of old
age, at least they’ll be in a better place, at least they’ve paid off their mortgage, or at least they won’t have to vote in the next election.A variant on both skirting and minimising, which my wife and I had a lot, was people insisting that against all the odds I’d recover. It reminds me of a probably embellished story about King George V, who almost on his deathbed was reportedly told he’d soon be well again and be able to take in the delights of the seaside town Bognor Regis. His response was simply, ‘Bugger Bognor.’
People usually mean well when they say that somehow the palliative radiotherapy you’re having for the pain might cure you, or that their cousin’s dog-groomer went into remission overnight against all medical expectations, but it comes across as you not listening to me. Your refusal to accept my predicament isn’t kind; it smacks of you ducking the issue (and maybe more for your benefit than mine). If the dying person is still a Panglossian optimist then do go along with it, but otherwise bugger that.