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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/20/the-guardian-view-on-dying-in-public-a-daily-heroism
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| The Guardian view on dying in public: a daily heroism | The Guardian view on dying in public: a daily heroism |
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| Towards the end of the last century it was fashionable and even for a while plausible to describe death as the last taboo – the one subject we could no longer mention. Since then there has been an astonishing outpouring of books and journalism about the experience of terminal illness. Steve Hewlett, who died on Monday morning, left to humanity a legacy of his own humanity in the diaries he wrote for the Observer and the radio interviews with his friend Eddie Mair. The poet, wit and critic Clive James, fortunately still with us, and the writer Jenny Diski, who died in December, both kept public diaries of their decline which excite compassion and admiration among tens of thousands of people. | |
| These records are inspiringly antiheroic. In contrast to the 18th-century tradition of writers using their own deaths as a moral – Addison making his last words “See how peacefully a Christian may die” contrasting with David Hume exhibiting how stoically a philosopher might manage death without any hope of an afterlife – the diarists of today are detailed and quotidian. Instead of a poised epigram – the Instagram of the 18th century – they are more like blogs, which show an ordinary life going on until one day it doesn’t. In this context, the way in which the presenter Eddie Mair teases his dying friend in their interviews is a wonderful demonstration of the way in which courage and love can saturate the fabric of everyday life. | These records are inspiringly antiheroic. In contrast to the 18th-century tradition of writers using their own deaths as a moral – Addison making his last words “See how peacefully a Christian may die” contrasting with David Hume exhibiting how stoically a philosopher might manage death without any hope of an afterlife – the diarists of today are detailed and quotidian. Instead of a poised epigram – the Instagram of the 18th century – they are more like blogs, which show an ordinary life going on until one day it doesn’t. In this context, the way in which the presenter Eddie Mair teases his dying friend in their interviews is a wonderful demonstration of the way in which courage and love can saturate the fabric of everyday life. |
| But even this openness has limits. Although we can contemplate the process of dying, and to some extent enter into it imaginatively, death itself is beyond imagination. It is a black hole from which nothing, whether matter or information, emerges into our universe. Traditional religious rituals helped give a shape and boundaries to this horror. The prolonged mourning of the Victorian age would come to an end after a fixed period, even if that were as long as a year; the week of darkness and silence that Orthodox Jews spend sitting shiva gives grief its dreadful due. In the decline of organised religion from the 1960s onwards these rituals fell out of the mainstream, but others have more or less spontaneously emerged. None has the widespread reach of the older conventions and as a result they are probably less comforting to the bereaved, for they no longer make an open proclamation of loss and grief which invites a response from strangers. | But even this openness has limits. Although we can contemplate the process of dying, and to some extent enter into it imaginatively, death itself is beyond imagination. It is a black hole from which nothing, whether matter or information, emerges into our universe. Traditional religious rituals helped give a shape and boundaries to this horror. The prolonged mourning of the Victorian age would come to an end after a fixed period, even if that were as long as a year; the week of darkness and silence that Orthodox Jews spend sitting shiva gives grief its dreadful due. In the decline of organised religion from the 1960s onwards these rituals fell out of the mainstream, but others have more or less spontaneously emerged. None has the widespread reach of the older conventions and as a result they are probably less comforting to the bereaved, for they no longer make an open proclamation of loss and grief which invites a response from strangers. |
| Nor do the British any longer take for granted the existence of an afterlife. Nearly half of us are more or less certain that there is no survival after death, and only a third expect one. All this tends to add to the climate of earthy realism with which death is increasingly discussed. | Nor do the British any longer take for granted the existence of an afterlife. Nearly half of us are more or less certain that there is no survival after death, and only a third expect one. All this tends to add to the climate of earthy realism with which death is increasingly discussed. |
| Yet even if dying is something which we now talk about more, perhaps, than at any time since the second world war, it is still seen largely as something that happens to other people. The inevitability of death in our own lives remains a little out of focus. It is extremely difficult for the NHS to think of death as anything other than a failure to be struggled against at almost all costs. This may be inevitable: any hospital which regarded death as a regrettable necessity would be a sinister place. The attempts to regularise and bureaucratise the process of dying using the Liverpool Care Pathway ended in shame and disaster, however praiseworthy and realistic the original plan had been. The division of care between hospitals and hospices makes emotional sense and helps both operate better. | Yet even if dying is something which we now talk about more, perhaps, than at any time since the second world war, it is still seen largely as something that happens to other people. The inevitability of death in our own lives remains a little out of focus. It is extremely difficult for the NHS to think of death as anything other than a failure to be struggled against at almost all costs. This may be inevitable: any hospital which regarded death as a regrettable necessity would be a sinister place. The attempts to regularise and bureaucratise the process of dying using the Liverpool Care Pathway ended in shame and disaster, however praiseworthy and realistic the original plan had been. The division of care between hospitals and hospices makes emotional sense and helps both operate better. |
| But we cannot stay forever on the healthy side of that line. Somehow, some day, each and every one of us will have to make that small, sometimes unnoticed, but always irrevocable, step from the up escalator to the down. Those who still write and talk to us even though their destination is fixed and growing closer enlarge our humanity as well as their own. | But we cannot stay forever on the healthy side of that line. Somehow, some day, each and every one of us will have to make that small, sometimes unnoticed, but always irrevocable, step from the up escalator to the down. Those who still write and talk to us even though their destination is fixed and growing closer enlarge our humanity as well as their own. |