Dying Read Online Free PDF Page B

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?
    Yes, I’m scared, but not all the time. When I was first diagnosed I was terrified.
I had no idea that the body could turn against itself and incubate its own enemy.
I had neverbeen seriously ill in my life before; now suddenly I was face to face
with my own mortality. There was a moment when I saw my body in the mirror as if
for the first time. Overnight my own flesh had become alien to me, the saboteur of
all my hopes and dreams. It was incomprehensible, and so frightening, I cried.
    ‘I can’t die,’ I sobbed. ‘Not me. Not now.’
    But I’m used to dying now. It’s become ordinary and unremarkable, something everybody,
without exception, does at one time or another. If I’m afraid of anything it’s of
dying badly, of getting caught up in some process that prolongs my life unnecessarily.
I’ve put all the safeguards in place. I’ve completed an advanced health directive
and given a copy to my palliative care specialist. I’ve made it clear in my conversations,
both with him and with my family, that I want no life-saving interventions at the
end, nothing designed to delay the inevitable. My doctor has promised to honour my
wishes, but I can’t help worrying. I haven’t died before, so I sometimes get a bad
case of beginner’s nerves, but they soon pass.
    No, there is nothing good about dying. It is sad beyond belief. But it is part of
life, and there is no escaping it. Once you grasp that fact, good things can result.
I went through most of my life believing death was something that happened to other
people. In my deluded state I imaginedI had unlimited time to play with, so I took
a fairly leisurely approach to life and didn’t really push myself. At least that
is one explanation for why it took me so long to write my first novel. There were
others. I had been trying to write the story of my parents for years, making character
notes, outlining plots, embarking on one false start after another. But again and
again I failed to breathe life into the thing, constrained by the fact that my parents
were still alive to read what I had written.
    Once my parents were dead I didn’t have to worry so much. I could say what I liked
about them without hurting their feelings. And once I knew that my own death was
looming, I could no longer make any excuses. It was now or never. I wouldn’t say
that made the writing of my novel, Me and Mr Booker , any easier, but it spurred me
on. This was my only chance to leave for posterity a piece of work that was truly
mine. For years I’d worked on screenplays, but that was a collaborative process.
And it is usual for screenplays to disappear into a bottom drawer, never to be seen
again. I know that novels disappear too, but at least they still exist, whole works,
whether hard copy or digital, as objects, and that has always been their appeal for
me. A book stands alone. A screenplay is only a suggestion for a story, but a novel
is the thing itself.
    It was a feeling like no other, in late 2011, to hold a copy of my first