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 of 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?