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Authors: Cory Taylor

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BOOK: Dying
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And then one Wednesday Susan didn't turn up. I waited for her to call to say she
was running late, but no call came. I heard nothing for a day, until Leanne from
the nursing service rang me with the saddest possible news. Susan had suffered a
massive stroke and was in hospital.

‘It's not looking good,' said Leanne. ‘I'm so sorry.'

‘I don't believe you,' I said. ‘I was the one who was supposed to die.'

‘I know. We're all in shock. I'll let you know as soon as I hear anything.'

A few days later Leanne rang me to say Susan had never recovered consciousness.

‘That's ridiculous,' I said. ‘She was sitting at my kitchen table a week ago laughing,
telling stories.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Leanne.

‘I've got two books of hers,' I said, as if the thought of her precious books might
bring Susan back from the dead. The books were coffee-stained, scribbled in. She
would want them returned.

‘I'll let her daughter know,' said Leanne. ‘Maybe she could pick them up.'

‘Please do.'

Susan's daughter rang and cried down the phone. ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit.'

I couldn't find any words to comfort her. I just told her how much her mother had
helped me over the past few months.

‘It was a privilege knowing her,' I said.

‘Thank you.'

She picked up the books a couple of days before Christmas. So like her mother, tall,
softly spoken, self-possessed.

‘It used to be the four of us,' she said. ‘Now it's down to Dad and me.'

I asked her how her father was.

‘Not great,' she said. ‘It was all so sudden.'

Everyone said the same thing. It was
so sudden, so unpredictable, a reminder to all of us that life is fragile. True,
but it wasn't how it was meant to be. Susan was supposed to bear witness to my passing,
not the other way round. I was sorry we hadn't recorded her life story instead of
mine during our meetings. I was sorry she hadn't had the same chance that I've had,
to say a long goodbye to those she loved, or to prepare them for life without her,
to the extent that that is possible. A sudden death cuts out all of the ghastly preliminaries,
but I imagine it leaves behind a terrible regret for all the things left permanently
unspoken. A slow death, like mine, has that one advantage. You have a lot of time
to talk, to tell people how you feel, to try to make sense of the whole thing, of
the life that is coming to a close, both for yourself and for those who remain.

A few months back I was invited to take part in a program for ABC television called
‘You Can't Ask That'
.
The premise of the show is that there are taboo subjects about
which it is difficult to have an open and honest conversation, death being one of
them. The producer of the program explained that I would be required to answer a
number of questions on camera. She said questions had been sent in from all over
the country, and the ten most common had
been selected. I wasn't to know what these
were until the day I went into the studio for the filming.

‘They're written on cards and placed face down on the table,' she said. ‘You're to
pick up one card at a time, read out the question, then answer it.'

‘I'll do my best,' I said, more than willing to help. I've never been a confident
public speaker. I've always been stymied by an uncomfortable suspicion that I was
only posing as an expert. But in this case there could be no doubt. I knew about
dying. In case my medical file wasn't proof enough, you only had to look at my ravaged
face. And I agreed with the premise. Death is a taboo subject, absurdly so. It is
tidied away in hospitals, out of public view, the secret purview of health professionals
who are generally unwilling to talk about what really goes on at the bedsides of
the nation.

It turned out that the producer of the program herself had a need to talk about death,
as she had recently lost her father to cancer, and was struggling to cope. This is
so often the case with people I talk to about my situation: they listen for a while,
then they tell me their own death story, but always with a vague sense that it is
shameful, that the whole sorry business is somehow their fault. In taking part in
‘You Can't Ask That', I wanted to do my bit to change things around, to win back
some dignity for the dying, because I don't think silence serves the interests of
any of us.

The questions, as it turned out, were unsurprising. Did I have a bucket list, had
I considered suicide, had I become religious, was I scared, was there anything good
about dying, did I have any regrets, did I believe in an afterlife, had I changed
my priorities in life, was I unhappy or depressed, was I likely to take more risks
given that I was dying anyway, what would I miss the most, how would I like to be
remembered? These were the same questions I'd been asking myself ever since I was
diagnosed with cancer back in 2005. And my answers haven't changed since then. They
are as follows.

No, I don't have a bucket list. From the age of fifteen, my one true ambition in
life was to become a writer. I started out by writing schoolgirl poetry, heavily
influenced by Robert Lowell, whom we were reading in class at the time. I had a massive
crush on Geoff Page, my English teacher, who used to recite Lowell to us in class
in his laconic drawl. It made my heart swell to hear him and I entered into a kind
of delirium that compelled me to sit up late at night scribbling my own Lowellesque
creations, convinced that, in the ordering of words, I had found my true vocation.
Later I moved from poetry to screenwriting, then to writing for children, and finally
to writing fiction. I published two novels and a handful of short stories. It wasn't
a stellar career, although I did manage to collect a
few outstanding mentors and
friends along the way, as well as some loyal fans. So, in that sense, I count myself
lucky. My real good fortune, however, was in discovering what I loved to do early
in my life. It is my bliss, this thing called writing, and it has been since my schooldays.
It isn't just the practice that enthralls me, it's everything else that goes with
it, all the habits of mind.

Writing, even if most of the time you are only doing it in your head, shapes the
world, and makes it bearable. As a schoolgirl, I thrilled at the power of poetry
to exclude everything other than the poem itself, to let a few lines of verse make
a whole world. Writing for film is no different. Emma Thompson once said that writing
a screenplay was like trying to organise a mass of stray iron filings. You have to
make the magnetic field so strong that it imposes its own order and holds the world
of the screenplay in its tense, suspenseful grip. In fiction you can sometimes be
looser and less tidy, but for much of the time you are choosing what to exclude from
your fictional world in order to make it hold the line against chaos. And that is
what I'm doing now, in this, my final book: I am making a shape for my death, so
that I, and others, can see it clearly. And I am making dying bearable for myself.

I don't know where I would be if I couldn't do this strange work. It has saved my
life many times over the years, and it continues to do so now. For while my body
is
careering towards catastrophe, my mind is elsewhere, concentrated on this other,
vital task, which is to tell you something meaningful before I go. Because I'm never
happier than when I'm writing, or thinking about writing, or watching the world as
a writer, and it has been this way from the start.

If I had a secondary ambition growing up it was to travel. And I've done a lot of
that, starting out with childhood expeditions led by my peripatetic father, then
going it alone, then teaming up with a husband who is afflicted with the same wanderlust
as I am. If anything, I've done too much moving around, to the point where I sometimes
envy people who have stayed in the same place all their lives and put down deep roots.
I blame my restlessness on Dad. He was an airline pilot who was happiest in mid-flight,
neither here nor there. As soon as he hit the ground he felt trapped. His flightiness
was the chief influence on my childhood. He moved constantly, from job to job, town
to town, country to country. To me this seemed like a natural way to live. I revelled
in the constant change, the excitement, the challenge of adapting to new situations.
It made me resilient and agile. If there was a cost to it all, I wasn't too concerned,
at least not until my parents' marriage fell apart under the strain.

As soon as I was able to, I started travelling on my
own. I didn't have much of a
purpose in mind, merely to see what was out there. I can still remember the green
canvas bag I bought for my first solo trip. Compact and sturdy, it was a nod to my
father's oft-repeated advice to travel light. I was headed for England, like so many
others of my generation, drawn to a country we thought we knew from reading about
it and seeing it on television. But travel, as well as being exhilarating, is also
a process of disillusionment, of measuring your expectations against a very different
reality. As I rode the train from Heathrow into London, I saw a landscape stripped
of all enchantment, barely breathing under a dull sky, and felt my spirits dip.
It was not exactly a disappointment, more a recognition that, in leaving home, I'd
merely exchanged one enigma for another.

Of all my travels, the ones I've enjoyed the most have been to places I knew nothing
about. Especially my first trip to Japan back in 1982. I had no preconceptions about
the place apart from travel-poster visions of cherry blossoms and bullet trains.
I arrived in the dead of night, disembarking at Narita Airport, which at the time
was under siege from angry neighbourhood farmers opposed to its expansion. But I
didn't know that, so I had no idea why the terminal was surrounded by razor wire
and guarded by riot police decked out in samurai-style armour. I stared out of the
bus window, transfixed, taking in the
scene in all its fascinating detail, trying
to fathom what might be going on. Guesswork, all guesswork, and it remained that
way over the days and weeks to come, as I struggled with this most unfamiliar country,
this empire of signs, as Roland Barthes so aptly dubbed it. Was I reading the signs
right, or getting things hopelessly wrong? These were real-life questions when the
problem was reaching the right destination along a train line, or emerging from an
underground station at the right exit.

I've never lost my wonderment at Japan. I've travelled around the country many times
since that first trip and I still thrill at the sights and sounds and smells: the
sugary cloud of charcoal smoke billowing from the grilled eel shop, the soupy vapour
you inhale with your ramen, the cut-straw sweetness of new tatami mats.

My point is that I've travelled enough, collected enough treasured memories to be
satisfied. You can never go everywhere and see everything. Even if you did, I suspect
there would be a point where you grew satiated with travel and longed to be home.
Because the pleasures of home can be just as great as the pleasures of travel, and
there is a price to be paid for wanting to be everywhere and nowhere, like my father.
When he couldn't fly anymore Dad was lost. He had no other interests, nothing to
ground him. I'm told that during his last confused days he fretted about his long-lost
flight log books. At times he became so
anxious about their whereabouts he had to
be sedated.

A bucket list implies a lack, a store of unfulfilled desires or aspirations, a worry
that you haven't done enough with your life. It suggests that more experience is
better, whereas the opposite might equally be true. I don't have a bucket list because
it comforts me to remember the things I have done, rather than hanker after the things
I haven't done. Whatever they are, I figure they weren't for me, and that gives me
a sense of contentment, a sort of ballast as I set out on my very last trip.

Yes, I have considered suicide, and it remains, for the reasons I have detailed,
a constant temptation. If the law in Australia permitted assisted dying I would be
putting plans into place right now to take my own life. Once the day came, I'd invite
my family and closest friends to come over and we'd have a farewell drink. I'd thank
them all for everything they've done for me. I'd tell them how much I love them.
I imagine there would be copious tears. I'd hope there would be some laughter. There
would be music playing in the background, something from the soundtrack of my youth.
And then, when the time was right, I'd say goodbye and take my medicine, knowing
that the party would go on without me, that everyone would stay a while, talk some
more, be there for each other for as long as they wished. As someone who knows my
end is coming, I can't think of a better way to go out. Nor can I fathom why this
kind of humane and dignified death is outlawed.

BOOK: Dying
2.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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