Under the circumstances, Susan’s attentiveness to my ramblings about my own life was flattering. None of my past troubles could compete with the death of a child, not my parents’ messy divorce, or my own romantic flounderings, or my failures and setbacks as a writer. Mine was the privileged tale of someone who had not truly suffered. The fact that I was dying now was sad, but not tragic. I had lived a full life. Susan’s son had died on the brink of manhood. The two deaths didn’t bear comparison. This fact reminded me over and over again that my circumstances were less a cause for sorrow than an opportunity to feel thankful for my unearned good fortune. My two sons were still alive. I would not have to outlive them the way Susan had had to outlive her son. That alone was an immeasurable comfort to me. And I think Susan knew that. I think she understood that she wasn’t just my chronicler, but my guide, my travel adviser to that bitter country she had already traversed a number of times before me.
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.