Dying Read online

  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 o
f 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.

  No, it would not be breaking the law to go out on my own. The newspapers are full of options: hanging, falling from a great height, leaping in front of a speeding train, drowning, blowing myself up, setting myself on fire, but none of them really appeals to me. Again I’m constrained by the thought of collateral damage, of the shock to my family, of the trauma to whoever was charged with putting out the flames, fishing out the body, scraping the brains off the pavement. When you analyse all the possible scenarios for suicide, none of them is pretty. Which is the reason I support the arguments in favour of assisted dying, because, to misquote Churchill, it is the worst method of dying, except for all the others.

  No, I haven’t become religious; that is, I haven’t experienced a late conversion to a particular faith. If that means I’m going straight to hell when I die then so be it. One of my problems with religion has always been the idea that the righteous are saved and the rest are condemned. Isn’t that the ultimate logic of religion’s ‘us’ and ‘them’ paradigm?

  Perhaps it’s a case of not missing what you have never had. I had no religious instruction growing up. I knew a few Bible stories from a brief period of attendance at Sunday school, but these seemed on a level with fairy tales, if less interesting. Their sanctimoniousness put me off. I preferred the darker tones of the Brothers Grimm, who presented a world where there was no redemption, where bad things happened for no reason, and nobody was punished. Even now I prefer that view of reality. I don’t think God has a plan for us. I think we’re a species with godlike pretensions but an animal nature, and that, of all of the animals that have ever walked the earth, we are by far the most dangerous.

  Cancer strikes at random. If you don’t die of cancer you die of something else, because death is a law of nature. The survival of the species relies on constant renewal, each generation making way for the next, not with any improvement in mind, but in the interests of plain endurance. If that is what eternal life means then I’m a believer. What I’ve never believed is that God is watching over us, or has a personal interest in the state of our individual souls. In fact, if God exists at all, I think he/she/it must be a deity devoted to monumental indifference, or else, as Stephen Fry says, why dream up bone cancer in children?

  Yes, I’m scared, but not all the time. When I was first diagnosed I was terrified. I had no idea that the body could turn against itself and incubate its own enemy. I had never been seriously ill in my life before; now suddenly I was face to face with my own mortality. There was a moment when I saw my body in the mirror as if for the first time. Overnight my own flesh had become alien to me, the saboteur of all my hopes and dreams. It was incomprehensible, and so frightening, I cried.

  ‘I can’t die,’ I sobbed. ‘Not me. Not now.’

  But I’m used to dying now. It’s become ordinary and unremarkable, something everybody, without exception, does at one time or another. If I’m afraid of anything it’s of dying badly, of getting caught up in some process that prolongs my life unnecessarily. I’ve put all the safeguards in place. I’ve completed an advanced health directive and given a copy to my palliative care specialist. I’ve made it clear in my conversations, both with him and with my family, that I want no life-saving interventions at the end, nothing designed to delay the inevitable. My doctor has promised to honour my wishes, but I can’t help worrying. I haven’t died before, so I sometimes get a bad case of beginner’s nerves, but they soon pass.

  No, there is nothing good about dying. It is sad beyond belief. But it is part of life, and there is no escaping it. Once you grasp that fact, good things can result. I went through most of my life believing death was something that happened to other people. In my deluded state I imagined I had unlimited time to play with, so I took a fairly leisurely approach to life and didn’t really push myself. At least that is one explanation for why it took me so long to write my first novel. There were others. I had been trying to write the story of my parents for years, making character notes, outlining plots, embarking on one false start after another. But again and again I failed to breathe life into the thing, constrained by the fact that my parents were still alive to read what I had written.

  Once my parents were dead I didn’t have to worry so much. I could say what I liked about them without hurting their feelings. And once I knew that my own death was looming, I could no longer make any excuses. It was now or never. I wouldn’t say that made the writing of my novel, Me and Mr Booker, any easier, but it spurred me on. This was my only chance to leave for posterity a piece of work that was truly mine. For years I’d worked on screenplays, but that was a collaborative process. And it is usual for screenplays to disappear into a bottom drawer, never to be seen again. I know that novels disappear too, but at least they still exist, whole works, whether hard copy or digital, as objects, and that has always been their appeal for me. A book stands alone. A screenplay is only a suggestion for a story, but a novel is the thing itself.

  It was a feeling like no other, in late 2011, to hold a copy of my first novel in my hand. When Patricia Highsmith’s publisher sent her copies of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, she couldn’t believe how much space they occupied. It seemed so brazen to have made an object that took up room in the world. I knew what Highsmith meant. I’d stuck my neck out at last, staked my claim to be taken seriously as a writer, and here in my hand was the proof. Now, I thought, I can die happy.

  Yes, I have regrets, but as soon as you start re-writing your past you realise how your failures and mistakes are what define you. Take them away and you’re nothing. But I do wonder where I’d be now if I’d made different choices, if I’d been bolder, smarter, more sure of what I wanted and how to get it. As it was, I seemed to stumble around, making life up as I went along. Looking back, I can make some sense of it, but at the time my life was all very makeshift and provisional, more dependent on luck than on planning or intent.

  Still, as the British psychotherapist and essayist Adam Phillips says, we are all haunted by the life not lived, by the belief that we’ve missed out on something different and better. My favourite reverie is about the life I could have led in Paris if I’d chosen to stay there instead of returning home like I did. I was twenty-two. I’d run away. I was meant to be in Oxford studying for a postgraduat
e degree in history, but a few weeks into the first term I decided to quit. I found Oxford both intimidating and dull. My supervisor was an expert in the constitutional history of New South Wales, and he was keen for me to assist with his research. He could see I was struggling and he meant to be kind, but his offer felt more like a punishment than a helping hand, and I prevaricated.

  I had a standing invitation from my cousin and his wife to visit them in Paris, so I emptied my bank account and bought a ticket. I remember standing on the deck of the ferry leaving Folkestone one blustery November afternoon and thinking that my life had just begun, that this was the start of my great adventure. France had always had a magical allure for me, ever since my high-school French classes with the effete Mr Collins. He made us draw maps of the country showing all the main rivers, geographical features and agricultural products. It seemed a land of such plenitude; I vowed to go there one day and see it for myself. As a sort of preparation for the voyage out Mr Collins gave each of us a French name. Mine was Jeanne. I took my new name as an invitation to adopt a whole new persona in a new language, someone more sophisticated and worldly than I was, a girl who knew her way around. It was the possibility of reinvention that I was drawn to—just as I still am. As soon as I stepped onto French soil I sensed my high-school alter ego spring back into life. Jeanne bought a packet of Gauloises to celebrate and smoked them on the train, while reading her copy of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. If only I could write like that, she thought, instantly dismissing her lingering doubts about quitting the academic life.