1. Try to keep fit
2. Accept your fate/insignificance
3. Live in the moment.
The celebration of ‘nowness’ must involve a rapprochement with will-power: the passivity of acceptance. I am certain that, at the end, I shall be listening not speaking; absorbing or perhaps receiving, not transmitting. When the ferryman arrives to transport me across the dark waters of the Styx, there may be no one to talk to any more, and – another ‘What if?’ – perhaps I shall be no longer able to speak.
At the edge of darkness, there may not be the dynamic interplay of speech and language, but – as I know from my own hospital experience – despite many other losses, there will be sound and hearing. Aural sensations are the last to fail. One of the strangest moments of my stroke, all those years ago, was lying speechless and semi-paralysed on a gurney, listening to the doctors discuss my case. I could not intervene, but I could be a spectator, and an audience, at my own descent into the underworld, that inevitable screening of the endgame.
To me, Every Third Thought suggests that the mystery of death and dying is only equalled by the mystery of life and living. Another conclusion: happy endings will be fortuitous. Consoling narratives must be patched together from transient fragments of experience.
So I wrap this up with some simple questions for this new century. Why not celebrate ‘nowness’? Discover the joy of wisdom and experience. Cherish your family. Celebrate the human drama in all its variety. Be happy to be old. Feast on the marrow of life while you can. Pass on to fellow-survivors, friends, and family a positive delight in the world. Even tormented old John Donne in his Devotions seems to find cause for optimism:
No man is well that understands not, that values not, his well-being, that hath not a cheerfulness and a joy in it; and whosoever hath this joy hath a desire to communicate, to propagate, that which occasions his happiness and joy to others.
In truth, there is no other sensible narrative available. Unless you believe in an afterlife – which I don’t – this must be the only way forward. It may be a hard lesson but, as Flaubert pragmatically once observed, ‘Everything must be learned, from reading to dying.’ On the other hand, there are also the mysterious revolutions of luck, the wheel of chance – and thereby hangs a tale. This is where I close, with a new and unexpected kind of love-story.
*
We met under a crab-apple tree, just outside Salisbury, in the garden of some mutual friends, during a summer lunch party.
It was a long time ago: about ten years.
I was contentedly married to Sarah, going full tilt with family life. Alice and Isobel, who can’t have been much more than nine and seven, respectively, were tearing up and down the grass with their friends, the triplets, who would soon take them across the meadow next door to swim stark naked in the cool river that prattled away in the distance, beyond a hayfield and a yurt.
And there I was, sitting at a garden table, watching these tiny riots of childhood breaking out around me when this rather elfin, smiling woman, almost ‘a girl’ (the word she would shortly use to describe the other mums on the grass), came up to say hello. She had just read My Year Off. Her mother was recovering from a stroke, she said, with swift, disarming candour. Perhaps we could talk?
What did I say, and what did we discuss? I have no memory, but I cannot forget the sensations of that conversation with Emma – she had introduced herself very easily as she sat down opposite me at the table.
I remember the sunshine bursting round us through the green web of overhanging branches. I think I remember drinking rosé, and feeling stunned and slightly exhilarated by Emma’s effortless and gracious manner.
We were talking about matters of life and death, and she was mixing gravity with laughter in the most infectious way, drawing me out, and opening me up with a deft sequence of highly personal questions about the aftermath of my ‘brain attack’.
I have never minded sharing the experience of my stroke, but this was more than sharing. This was in danger of becoming self-revelation. I remember thinking: I will tell you everything. Ask me any question, and I’ll answer, yes and yes, I will . . . Oh, whistle and I’ll come to you.
And so we talked. Picnic plates came and went; drinks were filled and refilled. Sarah must have been somewhere with our friends, or attending to the girls.
In truth, I was oblivious. What had begun as the kind of conversation often sponsored by the afterlife of My Year Off, had become something quite different. Strangely, it didn’t seem like a reckless flirtation. It felt quite natural; a conversation with an old friend. Such an old friend, apparently, that she did not feel the need to say goodbye.
At some point, distracted by the children, I turned round to discover that Emma had vanished as silently as she had appeared, in a way that I now know to be characteristic. I recall wondering if I should ask our hostess about this mysterious guest, but thought better of it: Don’t go there.
Lunch ended; the long summer’s day faded into twilight; we all piled into family cars to go home, and everyday life filled the void once more.
*
Ten years passed. Everyday life turned cold and bitter. I cannot explain the sad end of my marriage to Sarah except to confess that our love died, for no obvious reason, a painful admission. A break-up is like a death in the family. We went through the stages of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance (yes, there was counselling: a fruitless attempt to scramble into a lifeboat long after the ship had gone down). Somehow, we survived, salvaging scraps of parental continuity and coherence from the wreckage of family life in London and New York.
I had always known that the life of the stroke survivor is often cursed by divorce and depression. To begin with, I believed I had somehow escaped these furies. But now the professional frustrations of mid-life, mixed with the rallentando of getting on in years, contributed to an overwhelming sense of decline and failure. Sarah’s departure for her former New York home in July 2013, the month of my sixteenth birthday, seemed to set the seal on a vicious downward spiral in my life-cycle. The third act that beckoned hardly seemed to be an enticing prospect.
*
Alone in a new flat in West London, I began to negotiate an uncertain way forward as a single man. Solitude has its attractions, especially after the catastrophe of a failed marriage. Having time to read and reflect, to re-evaluate the important parts of my life and career, was quite appealing. We all need a room of our own.
At the same time, while the security of my bachelor apartment was a liberation, it was also a prison. I was lonely. In darker moments, I imagined that it would be my fate to be ageing and solitary for years to come. In this defeated mood, I was grateful for any distraction and quickly came to accept weekend invitations.
In retrospect, I was too numb with sadness to understand what was happening. At that moment, but not for much longer, I was going through the everyday routines like a Robinson Crusoe, though, unlike Crusoe, bereft of optimism, burdened with low-grade dissatisfaction bordering on despair, and hardly daring to look into the future. Single friends, who understood how to navigate this stage of life, had advised me to book up my weekends, and to make good plans for Christmas. I understood that they were right, but had so far done precisely nothing about it.
*
But then, in the autumn of 2013, about three months after Sarah’s departure, my friends, the —s, under whose crab-apple tree I had conversed with Emma all those years before, suggested a weekend in Dorset at the beginning of November. Why not? Better start somewhere.
As the date approached, I found a message on my mobile: could I give one of their weekend guests a lift?
I thought no more about it, conducted a brief exchange of texts about a possible departure time and suitable rendezvous, and answered the buzzer in my flat late on a Friday afternoon with only the most fleeting speculation about my passenger, a woman whose unfamiliar name had become attached to an anonymous mobile-phone number.
I took the lift down to the gloomy hallway, and hurried into the street through the heavy glass doors of the apartment block in which I was now living. Outside, it was cold and grey, with imminent autumn rain. There was, apparently, no one waiting. I turned to look round, glancing down the pavement. This was the moment – a scene from an improbably romantic movie – I will never forget.
Standing there, with a single suitcase, beneath her umbrella, slight and solitary and self-possessed, was the girl from the crab-apple tree. ‘Hi,’ said Emma, lighting up with her lovely, heartbreaking smile. ‘Haven’t we met before?’
THE END
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Footnotes
∗ See Robert McCrum, My Year Off (Picador & W.W. Norton), 1998
∗ The inscription the artist wrote on his canvas has no question marks, and all the words are in upper case: D’OÙ VENONS NOUS; QUE SOMMES NOUS; OÙ ALLONS NOUS.
Chapter Notes
1. A Matter of Life and Death
‘Now we are living in hell’: quoted in My Year Off, p. xvii.
‘This is not going to end well’: interview, Scotsman, 7 February 2010.
Empathy might be one key: see Peter Bazalgette, The Empathy Instinct (London, 2017) and Paul Bloom, Against Empathy (London, 2017).
‘it’s sad to be over sixty’: Nora Ephron, ‘Considering the Alternative’, in I Feel Bad About My Neck, p. 198.
‘Never send to know’: John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624).
2. Injury Time
Among older people: Atul Gawande, Being Mortal (London, 2014), p. 40.
‘Well? Shall we go?’: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London, 1956), pp. 54 and 94.
‘In the meantime, let us try and converse’: ibid, p. 62.
‘That’s man all over for you’: ibid, p. 11.
what Beckett calls ‘failing better’: The full quotation, from Worstward Ho, is: ‘Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
‘Thus bad begins, and worse’: Hamlet, 3, iv, 181.
‘We have time to grow old’: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. p. 91.
‘Go quick away’: The Tempest, 5, i, 339–46.
3. Forever Young?
‘The days of our years’: Psalms 90: 10.
‘The path forward would seem obvious’: Paul Kalanithi, ‘How Long Have I Got Left?’, New York Times, 25 January 2014.
‘the whirligig of time’: Twelfth Night, 5, i, 309.
‘Considering the alternative’: Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck, pp. 202–3.
4. I–Me–Mine
The lines of power: Atul Gawande, Being Mortal (London, 2014), p. 22.
The seventh-best selling book of all time: more than fifty million copies in print in almost fifty different countries.
‘We are a generation’: Nora Ephron: I Feel Bad About My Neck, p. 201.
‘There is a world elsewhere’: Coriolanus, 3, iii, 139.
‘We study health’: John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624): ‘The first Alteration, the First Grudging, of the Sickness’, Meditation 1.
The discovery that the brain: see ‘Brain survivors’, Guardian, 4 June 2015.
In new stroke units, across Britain: see Robert McCrum, ‘Twenty Years in Search of the Stroke Detector’, Observer, 22 January 2017.
5. The Skull of Man
‘A landscape opened up before me’: ‘The Terrible Beauty of Brain Surgery’, Karl Ove Knausgaard, New York Times, 30 December 2015.
atoms in the brain: Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think? (New York, 2001), p. 244, quoted in Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things (London, 2015), p. 262.
‘the hard problem’: Various cognitive scientists claim authorship of ‘the hard problem’, an expression that passed into the mainstream when Tom Stoppard adopted it as the title for a new play in 2014. The strongest claim comes from David Chalmers, the Australian philosopher who coined the phrase in 1995.
The tantalizing frontier: Ana Perez Galvan. She writes ‘I googled the ICTUS definition and the entry that comes out in Spanish for it when you type ICTUS is in fact this one. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidente_cerebrovascular.’ Ana adds that ‘The names cerebrovascular accident, brain damage, brain hemorrage or the lesser used name apoplexy are used as synonyms of the word ictus’. There isn’t an entry in Wikipedia for ‘ictus’ as such. Email 4 March 2016.
Life expectancy continues: In 1950, children under the age of five amounted to approximately 10 per cent of the US and UK population, while the population over eighty years old numbered about 1 per cent.
cut their own toenails: Des Wilson: Growing Old (London, 2014), p. 39.
The predictions suggest: Atul Gawande, Being Mortal (London, 2014), p. 36.
Since 1950, the median age: see David Willetts, The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future (London, 2010).
three main suspects: Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die (New York, 1993).
In May 2016, the BBC reported: ‘Too many delay seeking dementia diagnosis, charity says’, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-36286016.
6. Silly of Me
‘The Question therefore was not whether a Man’: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (World’s Classics, Oxford, 1986), p. 197.
the novelist Stephen King: New York Times, 31 October 2015.
When, at the age of fifty-eight: Julian Barnes, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, p. 97.
‘O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!’: King Lear, 1, v, 42–3.
‘Our basest beggars’: These quotations from King Lear are taken from 2, iv, 259–81.
‘Let me have surgeons’: King Lear, 4, vi, 194–5.
‘You must bear with me’: King Lear, 4, vii, 84.
‘I’m sixty. That’s supposed to be’: Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard, p. 311.
‘something was going wrong’: ibid., pp. 312–13.
‘know anyone who has got better’: ibid., pp. 305–10.
‘I can still work at home’: ibid., p. 306.
‘It is a strange life’: ibid., p. 316.
‘never amuse themselves with reading’: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, p. 198.
Prunella Scales is a much-loved: The Times, 10 December 2015.
‘It seems to me’: Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard, p. 327.
7. Losing the Plot
William Burroughs’ experiments: see A. J. Lees, Mentored by a Madman, pp. 1–27.
‘I would always encourage stem-cell’: interview with Professor Andrew Lees, 11 April 2016.
‘The name of the author’: Billy Collins, ‘Forgetfulness’.
‘poised to become the second leading cause’: Joseph Jebelli, In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer’s (London, 2017), p. xi. ‘We’re at the point,’ writes Jebelli, ‘at which almost everyone knows someone – a family member or friend – who has been affected.’
Six million inhabitants: Michael Brooks, New Statesman, 30 June 2016.
Alzheimer’s is everywhere: In late 2015, the BBC actually reported on a possible ‘cure’ for Alzheimer’s. Researchers at the University of Southampton had posted findings that supported the evidence that inflammation in the brain is what drives the disease. A drug used to block the production of immune cells called microglia cells in the brains of mice had been found to have a positive effect. Up until then, most drugs used to treat dementia had targeted amyloid plaques in the brain. The study, published in the journal Brain, suggested that targeting inflammation in the brain, caused by a build-up of microglia, could halt progression of the disease. At the moment of writing, however, this ‘breakthrough’ is still undergoing further analysis.
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