ANOTHER VOICE
Thoughts prompted by the death of Mark Boxer
AUBERON WAUGH
Death, which used to be a family occasion, has become a very private thing. In a sense, of course, there is nothing so acutely private as a person's own death. Even if he dies with many others in some plague or conflagration, or selflessly charg- ing into battle with his comrades, or gullibly drinking cyanide with fellow be- lievers in the Jonesville hecatomb, it is not easy for a man to make death a collective experience. But when my great-great- great-grandfather, the Revd Alexander Waugh DD, lay dying in Salisbury Place in December 1827, his deathbed was sur- rounded for three days and nights by all of his 11 children and 26 grandchildren who survived: of each of them he formally took his leave, exhorting them to good works and pious practices. An entire chapter of his biography (Life of Dr Waugh by the Revd James Hay and Revd Henry Bel- frage, published in Edinburgh by William Oliphant and Son, 1830) is devoted to a description of the death scene, culminating in the dread event itself:
On Friday morning, at twenty minutes be- fore seven, he opened his eyes, cast them round the circle of his weeping children, and bestowing one parting look of grateful recog- nition on his aged partner, his spirit returned to his Father and to his God.
Similar scenes are recorded in the letters and diaries of Ramsay and Margaret Mac- Donald (A Singular Marriage, ed. Jane Cox, Harrap, £14.95) published this week, and one is bound to conclude that they were more or less standard procedure in Christian families. In an age which has embraced the collective idea in greater or lesser repudiation of family and religion, people are expected to go away and die on their own in the facilities provided for this purpose by the state. In the event of their dying, inconveniently enough, in some public or semi-public place — on stage, or at a dinner party, or in a road accident the body is whisked away unceremonious- ly, sawdust is put down and swept up again and within a matter of minutes nobody would know that the Angel of Death had passed by.
I do not know what proportion of the 670,000-odd people who die every year in this country do so under the influence of opiate or tranquillising drugs which pre- clude any reflection or even knowledge of what is happening to them. But I have no
doubt that most people would prefer to die that way, if they were prepared to think about it at all. Death is bad enough, but the process of dying is something from which the modern mind recoils in horror.
These gloomy thoughts are prompted by the death of a friend, Mark Boxer. Much has been written this week on his achieve- ment as an editor, as an arbiter of fashion, as a satirical observer of the social scene, as a friend, and on the fact of his death. Perhaps it would be insensitive at this stage to suggest that we might all profit by meditating on the manner of his dying.
I do not know the details and would not relate them if I did. Knowledge of these things is nowadays left to the private grief of immediate family and closest friends. Quentin Crewe, in the Sunday Telegraph, wrote of his former colleague dying In gruesome pain but with gentle bravery'. I would not wish to seem to criticise a senior fellow-journalist, but I do not think that `gruesome' is the word I would use to describe anyone's pain on death, however acute. He may well be accurate in saying that Mark died in great pain, and the thought is bound to distress those who loved him, but in fact physical pain is not an important part in the terrifying mystery of death. Unreflective people often assert that they fear the pain of dying, but no pain is worse than that of a bad toothache, or childbirth. Neither of these things, which many of us have suffered, nor any pain, is of any importance in the perspective of eternity. And it is in this perspective which we must contemplate our own death — `Daddy was a fanatical teetotaller.' whether as eternal oblivion or nothingness, or in such fashion as religion, sentimental- ity, wishful thinking or perhaps reason may propose.
Mark more or less announced his im- pending death several months before the event. When I wrote to express my formal regret — stiltingly, and in paraphrase — he replied with a sweet, affectionate letter, too polite to labour the point, but unmis- takably bidding farewell. I did not visit him, judging, perhaps wrongly, that he should be left to his family and closest friends.
My impression is that Mark had no strong religious convictions, although it is always possible that the prospect of im- pending death may have concentrated his mind. Does any of us believe in an after- life? The question, as Freddie Ayer would say, is meaningless on the grounds that belief can only be a product of perception and reason. But most of us jolly well entertain the prospect as a congenial possi-, bility. It is one of the murkiest hangovers of Christianity that this congenial prospect should be attached to ancient terrors of retribution. But the real dread of death is dread of intellectual and sensory extinc- tion: we shall no longer be aware of what is happening to our children and loved ones, to those whose fortunes concern us, even to those who feature in Nigel Dempster's column. How could a man as lively in mind and body as Mark be extinct? The prospect for ourselves appals us.
Because the dead can't complain, we sentimentalise and transfer our anxieties about personal extinction into a concern for the happiness of those who have died. Their loss to us is paramount: we fondly transfer our desolation into an assurance that we shall all meet again hereafter. Perhaps we shall. But anything is surely preferable to the fashionable euphemism for death as a form of extended sleep.
All I can say with certainty is how happy and proud I was when, sacked from The Spectator in 1970 by the then editor in painfully ludicrous circumstances, the inci- dent was judged of sufficient moment to merit a Marc cartoon in the Times. It was no guarantee of immortality, but at the time it seemed to be. In this vale of tears we all tend to live for the moment. Whatever may have happened to Mark's intelligence, it is not sleeping.
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