Death

Hospital

I went to hospital on Monday to see a consultant to check up on the moles I’ve been worrying about. Here’s what I tapped out on my iPhone as I sat waiting to go in:

Hospital

It scares the living sh1t out of me. Just walking here brings deep anxiety to the surface. My heart rate is up, I’m conscious of my chest.

We don’t see illness and death unless we go looking for it these days, but here it all is. Everyone you look at you don’t know if they’re losing their life or here to save them. Especially the older people.

The NHS is fantastic, but support staff sometimes look right through you. Two members of staff are currently hailing each other down the length of a corridor in front of me, while I sit here with several others wondering whether fate has something lethal, painful or banal in store.

I will likely end my life in one of these places. And in this very hospital we witnessed the start of life too – my son was born here. But this hospital despite its cleanliness and modernity reeks more of entropy, human decline and infirmity than life.

It brings back my melanoma which is why I am here. I don’t want to die here, but maybe I will.

It turned out to be banal. That’s the weird thing about health. Like life, you take it for granted for much of your life, although you know you shouldn’t. But also, like life, you have to take it for granted – to some extent – otherwise you don’t make the best of it.

In the space of five minutes lethal turns to banal and in the space of five days fear to insouciance. I’m glad it’s this way round. But the useful goad to action, which having melanoma on my mind has been, is something I now need to find from a happier more positive place.

Reading my old friend Aristotle again sat on a tube ride yesterday – and talking to half a dozen different really thought-provoking people this week – I have some emerging ideas…

Death, Life, Work

Time

In this age of austerity, a lot of people are leaving my organisation through voluntary redundancy. Voluntary redundancy can be quite a good way to part company, but inevitably for some when the moment of farewell comes it is hard. Different people deal with it in different ways. Some have a knees up, some have and make speeches. Some slip away quietly, others have a go at the ‘leadership’ which includes me.

I’ve noticed though that some people – especially those who are nearly or over 60 and who have worked for 25 to 30 years for us – get quite frantic. This manifests itself as an incredible drive to get things ‘fixed’ before they leave. This can be their overall legacy, a last piece of work or sometimes just a detail they feel they can’t rest until they’ve sorted. It reminds me of the ‘nesting’ stuff we did before our first child was born – objectively you need to focus on the big change coming in your life, but instead you fuss about cot sheets, wallpaper and in our case finishing building the kitchen.

I was talking to a thoughtful and clever person at work about this today and I advanced my emergent theory of the ‘sands of time double whammy’. I believe our brains are Bayesian probability engines. Everything we do, see and think in some way gets incorporated into our brain so that we act and react based on a quasi-instinctive, but highly tuned estimation of the ‘thing to do’ in any situation based on the vast experience dataset we carry in our heads. So why the ‘double whammy’?

My theory (constructed in a thoroughly Bayesian fashion through a blend of unremembered facts, data, experience and sources) is that our perception of time over duration is relative – and related to how long we’ve been alive. My thesis is that the reason summer holidays seemed endless when I was little is bacause 6 weeks when you’ve only lived a few hundred weeks is a significant proportion of your total life. 6 weeks when you’ve lived several thousand weeks is much less – hence it feels like it passes faster.

Of course we could argue about the stimuli, as an adult you’re busier as a child you have days and days doing the same things. But it seems to me – and I’ve observed in others – as you age the passage of time accelerates. A Bayesian brain which logs everything is hardly going to ignore hard earned experience so new experiences and today must compete for salience with old and the many yesterdays.

That’s half the ‘whammy’. The other half is the ‘sands of time problem’. At 40 something I can still reassure myself I have a good chance of living as long again as I have lived so far. A good chance. But I know that’s becoming increasingly untenable. Within the next 5 years the odds of doubling my life so far will diminish rapidly.

So how will I feel when I am nearly 60, potentially leaving a life’s work, time running faster and faster and the end looming closer and closer? As I said to two different people today, come find me with a gun and shoot me if I’m still working flat out in an Executive job when I’m in my middle fifties.

Not that I’d be too old, just that my days will be racing away and the sands of my time pouring through my hourglass. If I’m still trying to please my boss, make my end of year targets and conjure up another organisation change I need to move on and get a life before the end of life gets me.

Death

Mourning

It has been a sad week for me. We took our trusty hound to be put to sleep on Tuesday. A bad business. He really was on his last legs with a huge tumour on his side, but it’s a horrible thing to have to go and do and will haunt me for a long time.

What shocked me was feeling the life go out of him. I was holding his head and his breathing became shallower, his nostrils flared progressively less and the tension went from his neck. Then I let go and saw him twitch a little, his once powerful shoulders suddenly sunken and then expected him to turn his head to look at me – perhaps accusingly.

But instead his eyes were fixed ahead and his muzzle rested on the floor. My partner wanted to close his eyes, but couldn’t and I saw his lower eyelid livid red and starting to sag. And I realised he was definitively gone.

Entropy, whichever law of thermodynamics, blind watchmakers, all hadn’t prepared me to see the organising energy which is life simply disappear in front of my eyes. He went from faithful companion, pain in the ass, geriatric incontinent and once proud rosette and race winner to a heap of skin, bone, microbes and sagging eyelid.

Whatever else life is, it is the most extraordinary force. We all take it for granted and seldom actually see it disappear in front of us in modern life. It’s the first time I’ve actually been with a large living thing when it died. I dread being with a human at their end but recognise one day I likely will.

I was shocked and chastened by seeing the very end of a life – 6 stone in weight, 3.5 feet high, 6 feet sprawled, 45 mph cruising speed, a big powerful, dopey, loveable, furry, white socked, bad breathed, friendly to everyone, cat chasing, stair jumping, bed stealing, door greeting, under your feet getting, leaning on you when stroked, tiger striped ex-racing Greyhound.

He’s chasing bunnies again in his dreams and is at rest. It’s a stark reminder for me though of how fragile, precious and extraordinary simply being alive actually is. And I understand now, perhaps for the first time, what mourning means.

Death, Life

Heart

With a heavy heart my partner and I agreed today that we would have our old retired racing greyhound put to sleep next Tuesday morning. He has a tumour which has grown to the size of a half football on his side which hasn’t bothered him much until now. But he’s in pain today, I can see it.

I spent the day with my son, who’s very small, but quite wise for one so little. We took a bus, a train, a boat and a taxi and then went out for a scoot together. Two nights ago he asked me if I would die. I didn’t really know what to say. I put my hand on his chest and said I will live a long long time and that we all live on through the people we love. His hand rested on top of mine sandwiching my hand on top of his little pumping heart. Since then he’s raised the topic of dying several times with me. Tonight we decided we would both live forever and this made him happy. I can save the truth for a bit.

I was talking on Friday to a friend who lost his father quite quickly and painfully. His demise hadn’t been a good one – messed about and messed up by the health service. His mother has developed a heart condition in the process. This got us talking about cardiac coherence – a concept I picked up in David Servan-Schreiber’s book Healing without Freud or Prozac. Cardiac coherence is when the physiological systems which accelerate your heart are perfectly balanced with those which brake it – you are in balance and your immune system is fully optimized.

He writes about a boy and his dog who happened by his lab and for fun they tested for cardiac coherence. Sure enough when the boy and his dog were together the electrocardiogram showed each of them to be in the state of chaotic balance which is cardiac coherence. When they were moved apart they kept a healthy heart rate but came out of coherence. Brought back together and the coherence returned.

I’m not sure my dog ever did that for me. He’s a lovely old chap, but he doesn’t bring me inner peace. One person that does though is my little boy. Like the boy and his dog, I have become aware that simply being physically close to him often swings my heart slowly but surely into perfect coherence – I am happy, at peace and have a full heart.

Death, Life

I saw that larger than life parliamentarian Cyril Smith had died yesterday. He was a big big man. I think I heard he peaked at 29 stone. I was a little surprised to hear he made it to 82, just goes to show being a gourmand won’t necessarily kill you.

What struck me though was the report of his memorial service. How he had spent his last days planning exactly how it would be – including hand written notes to people he cared for to catch them by surprise and delight them after he had gone. A warm-hearted joker to the last [albiet subsequent reports in have strongly suggest otherwise].

I’ve often thought mistily about death and the final taking stock of my life I will do. Who will be there smiling at my rosy faced cheeks. But reading about the actual reality of death as I did in Anti-cancer made my heart race, my chest tighten and my anxiety levels rise.

David Servan-Schreiber sets out the most common fears, it will hurt, I will be alone, my story will be unfinished, important things will be left unsaid etc. These are very real fears for me. He also writes that some people close on the moment with grace and tranquillity.

Our dog is dying. He has a big and growing lump on his side which will surely kill him in weeks not months. He’s had a good long life and I’ve noticed he’s sleeping more, I can see he’s chasing bunnies – he is running in his sleep, catching and mouthing and happy. A friend told me his dog walked slowly out into the garden one day curled up under a tree and gently floated away.

Much of my attraction to eudaimonia or flourishing (and the ancient Greek version of ‘happiness’ as the product of a life lived) is tied up with this final account. But on my bike this morning it came to me that maybe it will hurt, maybe it will be sudden, maybe it will be banal, maybe I won’t get to write handwritten notes.

So the time to achieve the eudaemonia is here and now, and the right moment to assess my happiness is today and every day.

Achilles left no handwritten notes.