Death, the idol

Michael Holroyd

A week? or twenty years remain?

And then — what kind of death?

A losing fight with frightful pain Or a gasping fight for breath?

John Betjeman Before I was 20, death was simply disappearance: someone walking into another room and closing the door; or the stage trick performed by a conjuror, painless and inexplicable, that left one knowing that somewhere behind the descending curtain everything was all right.

But during the Fifties my grandfather died. He died upstairs in his bedroom and then downstairs in the room where the family had made up a bed for him. He died on the stairs going down; he died in the ambtilance going off; and again in the hospital, once in a ward and two or three times in a private room. It took a fearful time, his dying, and we all died a little with him.

I saw it even then as a test for both of us: and we both failed. My grandfather was what we then called a fine man. There was talk, admittedly vague, of exploits involving the river and cricket pitch; and Mention was sometimes made of India. He was tall; he

A hundred years ago

The Times a short time ago, in a very interesting paper on colour-blindness, brought out the very great danger to which, in certain callings, colourblindness, especially when not recognised by those who suffer from it, exposes both themselves and the public. Among. nearly 8,000 railroad employees in Sweden, to whom the power to discriminate at once the colour of the various signal-lamps and signal-flags is quite essential, 2.15 per cent, were found on testing to be colour-blind; while of nearly 1,500 tested in Swiss schools and avocations, 6.58 per cent. were colour-blind. Among 10,387 males in American schools and colleges, 288 were found to be unable to discriminate reds, 75 greens, and 68 were partially colourblind, making a total of 431, or 4.149 per cent. These last observations were made by Dr Jeffries, the author of the book on colour-blindness published by Osgood, of Boston, and reviewed in the Times, and Dr Jeffries gives abundant evidence to show that it is a defect very often transmitted by descent from generation to generation. It appears, however, that not infrequently it is rather want of attention and teaching, than absolute want of faculty, which produces an apparent inability to distinguish colours.

The Spectator, 30 August 1879 wore a prim moustache; and he was always harmlessly pursuing his spectacles, his teeth, hearing aid and so on. He read The Times; and he believed — until, that is, he came to die.

During his last 20 years, when I knew him, he had had a rotten life. Though he owned the equipment — gloves, bowler, and a military-looking umbrella — and carried it all with him to London occasionally in the train, handing his Times up to the engine driver when they reached Paddington, he didn't really comprehend business. The post would arrive and he would set to work filling the backs of envelopes with complicated columns of figures. But they never 'came out' and he would look up, honestly bewildered, and damn his tea for being cold. Once there had been money (no one knew how); now there was not (no one knew why). After a long series of cautious investments, everything had leaked away. It was beyond my grandfather. The world was changing; he grasped' his umbrella and gloves but he couldn't make it out. The house began falling to bits: we had a double mortgage. The figures on the envelopes multiplied but we were reduced.

My grandmother's contribution to the quandary was to complain: this was her privilege and her talent. Herself, she had no money, being Irish, and she missed it dreadfully. In her imagination she had looked forward to becoming familiar with it in the most rigorously upper-class style though, having so little capacity for enjoyment, she had no notion of what she would actually do. Perhaps she needed this money as security, stacked up in the bank to comfort her against all those unfocused anxieties that death places in us. She got poorer, more querulous, and older — too old for the ski-ing and jewellery that money might have interested her in. She had illusions of speaking a few French words ('Jamais!' was one of them — though as a child I believed it meant a confectionery) to enrich her lamentations and the scoldings she gave to invisible servants.

There was no day, while I was growing up, no morning or afternoon, no breakfast, lunch or dinner, that was not blasted with quarrels and abuse, sometimes even tears and exits: a terrible hullabaloo that ritualistically culminated in battles with my aunt over the washing-up. She was a terrestrial figure, my aunt, firmly planted on the ground, and my grandmother (though scarcely five feet herself) would soar above the spoons and saucepans with loud petitions to the Almighty to 'take' her. But he never did, not while my grandfather was alive and out of hearing. We got so used to her calling on the Lord in her strong and wobbly voice that we ceased to hear her — and so apparently did He.

Ours was the sort of life that drove us to entreat death, until my grandfather began to die. It was then we realised, all of us, how much better a living death is than a real one. While my grandmother used to parley openly with the monster in the scullery, 1 had lain upstairs in literary communion with it. It was not a frightening monster, this death, but something fit for the nursery. Death for me lived happily in the past, chiefly the nineteenth century. My window looked out on a cemetery, a pretty spot with bells ringing over it, 'an open space among the ruins,' as Shelley had written, . . . It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a spot'. It was so easy to be 'half in love with easeful death,' to call the monster soft names and believe it would grow up to behave softly.

We had known death as part of fiction: my grandfather brought it to us as fact. His was what is described as a 'natural' death.

He died slowly, reluctantly, with desperation and in terror, realising in his exhaustion that there was nowhere to go but into oblivion. The change in him was awful. His life, for so long incomprehensible and bleak, now seemed to him wonderfully desirable. He yearned for more of it. But the remorselessness and pain of the dying process, which used up all his strength, made him unrecognisable as the man we had turned to at the head of the dining table, who had dominated world affairs with the aid of his wireless, but who was now frightened of the nurses. All he had believed, all we had struggled to believe in through him, was gradually rubbed away as he went on dying in front of us. He had believed: but no one could help him now in his unbelief. Of what use were the gentlemanly standards he had sworn by, through thin and thinner? All his life he had religiously lost his money and in death he was not rewarded. He had left his card but the Great Gentleman above was not at home.

As a source of strength his vanished faith was replaced by drugs: and these also changed him. They made him sleep but they gave him no rest. His sleep was pitted by nightmares and he would wake, worn out, after hours of solitary wrestling and shouts against his unseen opponent. The addition of drugs altered his appearance as the loss of belief had altered his character. His face sank in, the colour of his skin went to green and purple. The hospital ward was full of men lying at acute angles in barricaded beds, strapped, plugged, tied, suspended, wrapped. Like grotesque babies, they lay in their cots, waiting. One day, after two taut hours at the bedside, I was relieved by my aunt who wearily pointed out that. I had been sitting next to the wrong patient. I hated these sessions beside the bed., I seemed to be filled with all my grandfather s fear and sadness. 1.hated. too. all those marching matrons and implacable ward sisters. The wards were like parade grounds where the Last Post was constantly sound ing. and marks were still.being awarded for deportment and smartness. Dennis Potter tells a story of a man opposite him in hospital, who died of cancer at mid-day, being asked by the inspecting doctor earlier • that morning how he felt and whispering (as his last words): 'In the pink'. That was how it should be done. By such standards, his own until now, my grandfather was not making-a good death. He was letting himself down and, so he felt. letting us down. This Was what he meant when he looked at me and gasped: 'I'm sorry'. Death is a fragment of democracy. We begin to die when more people want us dead than alive. 'We must love one another or die'. We must die. There were times during my grandfather's ordeal when I caught trlYself willing it to be over. He did not want that but in the secret ballot he was outvoted. When they telephoned to say that he had died 'fairly comfortably' one morning. all of us I think felt some deep relief. A death in the family is different to the death of someone loved: not so much loss, maybe, but more guilt and a greater sense of the hurrying conveyor belt.

We all reacted differently. My father looked grave – the kind of face he used going to business meetings. 'My God. This Is an awful place.' he unconsciously quoted as we stood in the undertaker's hygienic °Mee. My grandMother wrung her hands above her head and sang her grief away in a frightful Irish dirge that scraped our nerves but gave us a target for our hostility. My aunt particularly deplored this undignified opera: it seemed to parody her own pain. Her father had been her god: no one could match her sense of loss. We fell back as she came up to'the corpse. plastered with frozen Pink cosmetics leant over, and lingeringly kissed the gaping face: something I had never seen her do to the living man. I could not do it: there was too much fear in me for love.

Perhaps it was appropriate for someone who was to write biographies that his strongest emotion up to then should derive from someone else. I tried to write my f. eelings away. covering a thousand pages of

family chronicle, a novel that was to solve death, lick it in the final chapter that I never reached.

My reading also changed. I raged against the dying of the light. Death had entered the twentieth century and was close; an anaesthetic from which no one comes round. 'I could die today if I wished.' writes Samuel Beckett. 'merely by making a little effort'. We have come to admire those who be this effort. who do not wait around to be broken up by death as my grandfather Was. John Berryman. Sylvia Plath. Virginia

oolf who took death into their own h_ ands. all became idols of the Seventies. In L, .ondon, a play on euthanasia is still a smash hit. For to be in control of one's death – to decide when and how – that removes the been a bit. For 30 years a friend of mine has _been carrying round with him a fatal lozenge that he will one day pop into his mouth. But will it work? In the Eighties perhaps such subterfuge will not be necessary.

For Our attitude to death is changing. There is reaction against people, such as myself who have put our trust in chemistry. Sometimes. it seems that we have almost succeeded. like alchemists, in discovering the formula for Immortality. I am visited by animals. but I have none of my own. No plants. either. Where nothing lives, nothing can die. We have redefined the meaning of death so many times in recent years that few of us now know. legally and medically. when it occurs. what it is. We have given death a fashionable 'crisis of identity'.

Meanwhile our technique of replacements and of electric aids encourages us to' believe that one day – and please hurry – we can be wholly renewed, piece by piece. Tom's heart, Dick's eyes, Harry's liver; new arms and legs twitched on and off by batteries; intestines floating in chemicals; our lungs and lights pumped up with antibiotics and pinned with plastic fittings: so shall we stand as miracles of .medical engineering. refurbished so that our spirits may continue to be hQ2,10.-in these prefabricated bodies. It is–My to feel the revulsion caused by such images. There are those who believe that we have learnt the wrong lesson from deaths such as my grandfather's. We have made death. they say. into an obscenity. Once it was sex that was obscene. We pretended that it did not exist, and made its existence into something evil. Then it was money that was unmentionable –so unmentionable that for years we turned our backs on social injustice. Now death has become the unspoken subject. We treat it like an infectious disease. render it impersonal. tasteless. unreal by presenting it on television and staring at it as children stare at comics. But to banish death. our critics object, is to sentimentalise life. They want to bring back death as part of life, since without it, they argue. life loses its intensity and we waste it. Animals do not fear natural death: it is unnatural for us to do so.

There are two conclusions: one for the daytime, one for the night. When the sun shines down and I am feeling cheerful I welcome this new attitude to death.But in the palpitating hours before dawn. when I remember my grandfather and think ahead, I find no comfort here.