My death

September 2018

I want to face my death with stoic equanimity.

These are the things I currently know about my death.

The most important thing to remember is that my death is a worse event for those who love me than it is for me. This is for two related reasons.

The first reason is that I will never have to endure life in a world without me in it. That's not so for the people who love me, unless they predecease me.

I started to learn this in a rather shameful way. Jo and I were buying a house together for the first time. It would involve a large mortgage that needed both of our salaries to service. Jo had death in service life cover as part of her employee contract; I was self-employed and had no employee contract and not the slightest inclination to spend any of my income on life insurance. 

I actually remember saying "Why on earth do I need life insurance? Why pay each month for the promise of a big sum of money that only arrives when I'm dead and gone?"

The shame is compounded by the length of time it took Jo to persuade me that maybe being able to pay off my part of the mortgage when I die, and thereby not leaving her with the twin problems of mourning the death of her most significant other and needing to find a new place to live, was a thing worth spending a modest monthly sum on.

If I'm honest, a part of me still thinks that this is actually a risk that Jo should have been paying to cover, not me. Yes, her employer was already providing me with cover for my equivalent risk, but that is not something I had asked for or felt that I needed.

I am very much a que sera, sera kind of guy. If my destiny is to lose the love of my life and be unable to continue living in the home we used to share, well, sera. Though see also "Trust in Allah but tie up your camel".

Right now, though, it is looking more likely that the love of my life may be losing me, as I have recently been diagnosed with bladder cancer. I have tied up my camel to the extent of alerting the NHS, and while they are currently confident of being able to stop this thing seeing me off, they and I know it is by no means a foregone conclusion.

Prior to that whole life insurance embarrassment I gave no thought whatsoever to the universe without me in it that would follow my death. I may even have been so solipsistic as to think that it wouldn't really exist in any meaningful way. I hope these days I am less prone to such major lapses of imagination and empathy, but I'm not sure. 

To cut myself some slack here, this could be a consequence of a general strategy of not paying thought to situations that are beyond my control. That is, I believe, a good general strategy, and it is certainly the case that there is nothing more beyond my control than the universe after my death - in the big list of uncontrollables it's up there with the universe before my birth.

This sort of thinking, of course, boils down to the observation that the only point in space and time that might possibly be within my control is right here, right now. I am also very much someone who lives in the moment.

Anyway, the point is that I have now spent some time imagining the world after my death and that imagining has led me to the realization that while this is totally immaterial to me it will be very much material to lots of people who really matter to me. Welcome to the blindingly obvious, Miles!

Yet. 

Surely the person to whom my death matters most ultimately is me? I've seen enough loved ones die over the years, and with each one however painful the grief there is also a keen pang of joy that I'm still here. That won't happen when I'm the one to go.

So, I said there were two related reasons why my death is worse news for those who love me than it is for me. 

The operation to remove my cancerous tumour involved a general anaesthetic. I remember it being administered. I wasn't particularly worried, I knew the risks at this point were minimal. If anything, I was curious about the whole procedure.

I also knew that, were I to die on the operating table, from my perspective this would  be an excellent way to go. There I am, thinking that I'm doing something for the very good reason of prolonging my life. Me and the NHS, we're a team. We've got this! Those would be my last thoughts as the anaesthetic kicks in.

Had it all gone horribly wrong, I simply would not have had the experience of waking up a couple of hours later on the hospital ward. Nor any subsequent experience, in this world at least. The hopeful thoughts in my head as I went under would have been my last thoughts.

And, for me, so what? I might have a bucket list as long as my arm but I'm no longer around to fret about not having done any of it. For everyone from the surgeon having to explain a botched operation to the grieving relatives and beyond it is a total disaster, but me, I'm just Mr Oblivious.

Yet.

That was what I used to think prior to my cancer. Does it still hold now? By the way, while I arrived at this "death where is thy sting" argument all by myself, I've since learnt that Spinoza got there long before me.

The argument is, I think, unassailable. But if I let myself imagine all the potential future that I won’t get to experience, that quickly starts to feel like a tragic loss until my inner Stoic kicks in and reminds me not to waste precious time thinking about things I can't control.

Nonetheless, it feels important that I try to imagine a universe without me in it.

Over the summer I read Carlo Rovelli's "The Order of Time". I can't say I totally understood it, but that is no fault of the author or his translator. It is a piece of writing that is at times hard science, at others lyrical and others mystical.

From it I learnt that time is very different from one part of the universe to another. In the part of the universe where we are, we are deeply bound up in time, so bound up that the existence of ourselves outside that time is near unimaginable.

The power of Rovelli's book, for me, is that I did manage to glimpse my existence outside time. The book makes clear that the time that we all experience is a local phenomenon, just as we are local phenomena enmeshed in it. Eternity is not time without end, it is beyond time. 

We human beings are chained to time. We have memory, and a remorseless present. When I die I will be freed from this remorseless present. I have no idea what that means for me - I have no definition of "me" that makes sense outside this ever unfurling present time and the memories it leaves behind - but I find a strange comfort in the thought of being so unfettered. 

The riches of the universe are way beyond our ability to perceive. I have spent 64 years living in time. This has been a remarkable experience; as Peter Blegvad puts it: "Through pinholes in the meat we see portions of eternity". What a privilege! Yet it is an experience that I am now properly familiar with. I may not have made the most of it, but the general idea of my existence in time I now understand. 

I have borne witness. And I am curious to see what happens next, despite the risk that it is merely oblivion.

So, Spinoza. What if I'm wrong to think that the universe after my death is not my concern? What if my death is the removal of the reality goggles that have had me persuaded that I am a conscious being called Miles Doubleday living through a remorseless present for the past 64 years?

I can't imagine that after I die, that conscious being living through a remorseless present has some sort of analogue in an afterlife: Miles in Heaven, Hell or Limbo. But nor can I shake off the idea that my death is, as J.M. Barrie had it, "an awfully big adventure."

I also now can't imagine a universe without me in it. From eternity's point of view, if that bit of the universe that has me living through time in it has now reached the point where the me doing the experiencing reaches the point in time where he ceases to exist, again, so what? From a viewpoint outside time my existence from birth to death remains as it ever was.

Some faiths hold that at death we return to the collective consciousness, whatever that entails. No scientific discovery I've come across in my lifetime has yet put a dent in that possibility. 

So, how's that stoic equanimity coming along? Reading the above it sounds as though it is doing pretty well.

As I write I am waiting for the NHS to announce the next round of treatment for my cancer. These days of living with it but not doing anything to try to fix it are perhaps the biggest test of that stoicism. Happily I have very few symptoms to remind me that all is not well, and those I have occur intermittently. When they do, my resolve can wobble.

Each day of life remains remarkable. I try to remember this and honour it accordingly. The equanimity is holding, for now at least.

What of all my unfinished business? Will I ever reach grade 8 on the piano? If I do, will I manage to get myself onto a composition course? If I do, will I manage to write a composition that I'm proud of? How about a symphony, then?

The answer to at least some if not all of these questions is: probably not. There was a time when I was more regretful of how wasted my life felt. These days I don't seem to be able to summon the regret. That seems like good news to me. Is that thanks to Rovelli?

Free will has never felt more illusory. I am the product of particular conditions of nature and nurture that have held over my lifetime. These particular conditions mean that right now I am trying to write about all of the things that have been important to me over that lifetime. And I'm still practicing the piano each day. As a 90-year old Pablo Casals said, I think I'm getting better.

The next day…

What is missing? Rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light. I can't even manage one rage, let alone three. This damping down of my emotions, taking the lead from my rational side and its unassailable arguments has been a pattern across my life. I was nineteen when my father died and an aunt worried for my failure to let out my grief.

The worst thing I have had to deal with since I embarked on my life with cancer has been the distress it causes for people I love, even if they in turn say their distress is for what is happening to me, not them.

Somewhere in the mix lies entitlement. 

I am a public school educated white European man. Able bodied and cis too. My privileged life has led me to a profound dislike of entitlement. To others I am sure I exhibit many of the behaviours of entitlement, but I try hard to weed entitlement out of my world view.

I prefer to think that I am entitled to nothing. Then, perhaps, I might be able to show gratitude for all that I have. I am aware that this is a position that can only be adopted by someone dripping with privilege. If throughout my life I had been denied resources that all around me shared in, then I would rightly start to feel an entitlement to a share in those resources. Yet the absurd paradox is that it whenever I come across entitlement it is from those who already possess the resources that their neighbours do not. As such, it comes over as a frantic attempt to paper over what in their heart they know is an injustice that acts in their favour.

When it comes to my death, therefore, I consider myself entitled to nothing. This leaves me profoundly grateful that I live at a point in space and time where medicine is so advanced that it has enabled me to survive appendicitis in my thirties, and allows me to feel a degree of optimism about surviving bladder cancer in my sixties. 

More fundamentally, it leaves me profoundly grateful that I have lived at all. To further expect to live a particular minimum number of years seems almost offensive to me. 

Miles! Get in touch with your inner rage! You know it is in there, somewhere.

I'll let you know if I do.

The next day…

I struggle to complete things, and have just read an essay by Brian Blanchfield called "On completeness". In it he equates this struggle with a fear not of death but of life.

A fear of life. Is that what I have? 

One thought I've had in answer to the question "What if I am dying now?" is that it's fine: I've done okay. I am loved by many good people, I don't leave any debts, my life is not in any particular sort of mess. It's only recently that all three of those statements has been true. I'm left with a feeling of, "Hey, I've done it! I've got to the end without messing up!" Yes, it is okay to die now.

Still, I don't think I would get top marks for this life I have lived. I might scrape 80% from a generous examiner. That I would not score higher is down to a fear of life.

I take risks, but only safe ones. I imagine lots of wonderful things that I never dare to bring into the world - or am too indolent to make happen. No, it is worse than that: I don't believe I have the strength of character to make them happen.

If it turns out that I'm not dying any time soon, then will this prove to be the slap in the face that I need in order to be less fearful of the rest of my life?

Best part of four years later…

My fear of life still has me in its thrall. I've lost faith in my writing (privileged white male thoughts are so not 2022), my piano playing improves glacially (still not nailed grade 8) and my focus on it sidelines more creative things I might be doing in music. Plus for the first time in my life I feel properly old: like Leonard Cohen in his later years I ache in the places where I used to play. Any serious ambitions I have now are ones that need to be done sitting down or in bed. Still, that rules out neither piano improvement nor writing all this, whatever it is.

But maybe Jo and I are moving in the right direction. The fact that I am here, returned to what I wrote four years ago, is a promising sign. And I've just read other pages from the intervening years and I think there is something useful there. Perhaps.

A couple of months later…

Something has shifted. I'm now not bothered that I cannot summon Dylan Thomas' rage. Nor am I so concerned about the things I have failed to achieve in my life.

In place of rage I am working on acceptance. And my failures to achieve have left space for others, less privileged than I am, to achieve in.

The second of those assertions may sound suspiciously like a cop-out. But it relates to my "so not 2022" earlier comment. It is a reframing of my life from one of failure to reach my potential to one of standing back to allow others with a more urgent need to reach theirs. Yes, arguably it is not a zero sum game but also, arguably, it is.  

I have lived a life in which the most prominent voices have been those of white, European men. My book and record shelves reflect this. My lifetime of television and film viewing reflects this. Every one of those cultural products which I have consumed has taken the space of an equivalent cultural product from a minority voice. It's not as though those minority voices were always there for me to pick if I chose to do so; maybe they were, but they were buried beneath the attention that those majority voices garnered.

Over the years my curiosity has met with dwindling returns from listening to majority voices. Yet any time I listened to a minority voice my curiosity would come away sparking with new ideas. A most recent instance is Emma Dabiri's What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship To Coalition. When I got to the Undercommons it blew my mind.

For ten years now I have lived in an intentional community. My biggest learning over those ten years is learning to shut up and listen to others.

I like to believe that at the back of my mind I have always known this. At Harrow I could have followed the same path as others who now are part of our ruling class; others who maybe never saw themselves as anything other than that. Even back then I knew that my rejection of this so-called opportunity was the right thing to do, though I have to tip my ridiculous schoolboy boater to Lindsay Anderson's film If coming out at exactly the right time to confirm this.

And what of rage? What of fear of life?

Acceptance just feels better.