Nothing to Be Frightened Of (23 page)

Dying in character: an instructive case. Eugene O’Kelly was a fifty-three-year-old chairman and CEO of a top American accountancy firm. By his own description, he was a paradigmatic success story: a “type A” personality with 20,000 employees under him, a frenetic schedule, children he didn’t see enough of, and a devoted wife he referred to as “my own personal Sherpa.” Here is O’Kelly’s account of what he termed “My Perfect Day”:

I have a couple of face-to-face client meetings, my favourite thing of all. I’d meet with at least one member of my inner team. I’d speak on the phone with partners, in New York and in offices around the country, to see how I could help them. I’d put out some fires. Sometimes I’d have a discussion with one of our competitors about how we could work together towards one of our professional common goals. I’d complete lots of items listed in my electronic calendar. And I’d move ahead in at least one of three areas I’d resolved to improve when I was elected to the top spot by the partners of the firm three years earlier: growing our business . . . enhancing quality and reducing risk; and, most vital to me and the long-term health of the firm, making our firm an even better place to work, indeed a great place to work, one that allowed our people to live more balanced lives.

In the spring of 2005, O’Kelly was “one of 50 CEOs invited to participate at a White House business roundtable with President Bush. Was anyone luckier in his job than I?”

But just at that moment, O’Kelly’s luck ran out. What he thought was temporary tiredness after an especially tough schedule turned into a slightly drooping cheek muscle, then into a suspicion of Bell’s palsy, and then—suddenly, irreversibly—into a diagnosis of inoperable brain cancer. This was one fire that could not be put out. All the most expensive experts could not divert the onrushing truth: three months and barely a day longer.

O’Kelly responds to this news like the “goal-driven person” and ultimate corporate competitor that he is. “Just as a successful executive is driven to be as strategic and prepared as possible to ‘win’ at everything, so I was now driven to be as methodical as possible during my last hundred days.” He plans to apply “the skill set of a CEO” to his predicament. He realizes that he must “come up with new goals. Fast.” He tries to “figure out how I as an individual needed to reposition swiftly to adjust to the new circumstances of my life.” He draws up “the final and most important to-do list of my life.”

Priorities, methods, targets. He gets his business and financial affairs in order. He decides how he is going to “unwind” his relationships by creating “perfect moments” and “perfect days.” He begins “transition to the next state.” He plans his own funeral. Ever competitive, he wants to make his death “the best death possible,” and after completing his to-do list, concludes: “Now, I was motivated to ‘succeed’ at death.”

For those who think that any Hundred Days inevitably leads to Waterloo, the notion of “succeeding at death” may seem grotesque, even comic. But then everyone’s death will be comic to someone. (Do you know what O’Kelly did shortly after learning that he had only three months to live? He wrote a
short story
! As if the world needed another one . . .) And then, with the help of what must inevitably be called a ghost, he put together the book you decide to write—the one about dying—when faced with your final delivery date.

O’Kelly lists and categorizes the friendships he needs to unwind. Even before he gets to his inner circle there are, astonishingly, a thousand names in his book. But with the speed and attack of one used to closing deals, he completes the job in three weeks flat: sometimes with a note or phone call, occasionally with a brief meeting which might perhaps contain a “perfect moment.” When it comes to unwinding closer friendships there is some sporadic human resistance. One or two friends don’t want to be fobbed off with a single farewell, a stroll round the park while shared memories are evoked. But like a true CEO, O’Kelly overrides such clinging sentimentalists. He says firmly, “I’d like this to be it. I set this up specifically so we could unwind. And we made a perfect moment out of this. Let’s take that and go forward. Let’s not schedule another one. Trying to improve on a perfect moment never works.”

No, I don’t think I’d put it like that either. But then, I doubt I’ve met anyone quite like O’Kelly. The “unwinding” he plans for his teenage daughter involves a trip to Prague, Rome, and Venice. “We would fly by private jet, which would require us to refuel somewhere in the far, far north, and that would give Gina an opportunity to meet and trade with the Inuits.” This is not so much dying in character as dying in caricature. You say goodbye to your daughter, but you also build in for her
an opportunity to trade with the Inuits
? And do you inform the Inuits what their privileged function is to be on this occasion?

Such moments may provoke a satirical and disbelieving gawp. But O’Kelly was surely dying as he had lived, and we should all be so lucky. Whether or not he cheated a little is another matter. The CEO had not previously had much truck with God, because of the tightness of his schedule; though he did use Him as a kind of emergency breakdown service. Some years previously, the prospective Inuit-trader had been diagnosed with juvenile arthritis, and her father remembered that “You could find me in church often that year.” Now, with his own final deal shortly to be closed, O’Kelly again refers things upwards, to the transnational HQ in the sky. He prays, and learns to meditate. He feels supported from “the other side” and reports that “there is no pain between this side and the other side.” His wife explains that “If you conquer fear, you conquer death”—though you don’t, of course, end up
not dead.
When O’Kelly expires it is, according to his own personal Sherpa, “in a state of tranquil acceptance and genuine hope.”

Psychoanalysts tell us that those who are most attached to their own personalities have the most difficulty in dying. Given O’Kelly’s A-typeness, his age, and the swiftness of his end, his behaviour is highly impressive. And perhaps God doesn’t mind being addressed only in emergency. It may seem to bystanders that any sensible deity ought to be offended by such spotty, self-interested attention. But He might view things differently. He might, modestly, not want to be a daily, occluding presence in our lives. He might enjoy being a breakdown specialist, an insurance company, a longstop.

O’Kelly didn’t want organ music at his funeral; he specified flute and harp. I gave my mother Mozart; she gave my father Bach. We spend time thinking about our funeral music; less about what music we wish to do our dying with. I remember the literary editor Terence Kilmartin, one of my early encouragers, lying on a bed downstairs when he was too weak to climb a stair, listening to late Beethoven string quartets on a portable boom box. Dying popes and emperors could summon their own choirs and instrumentalists to help them sample the glory to come. But modern technology has made popes and emperors of us all; and though you may reject the Christian heaven, you can have the Bach
Magnificat,
Mozart’s
Requiem
or Pergolesi’s
Stabat Mater
lighting up the inside of your skull as your body fades. Sydney Smith thought of heaven as eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets—which has always felt to me like a clash rather than a concord. Still, you could have the rousing massed brass of Gounod’s
St. Cecilia Mass
thundering in your ears while a tube bubbles sugary feed into your arm.

I suspect that if I get any sort of decent dying time, I shall want music rather than books. Will there be space—head-space—for the wonderful trudgery of fiction, the work involved: plot, characters, situation . . .? No, I think I’m going to need music, fittingly intravenous: straight to the bloodstream, straight to the heart. “The best means we have of digesting time” will perhaps help us digest the beginnings of death. Music is also associated for me with optimism. I had an instant sense of fellow-feeling when I read that one of the pleasures of Isaiah Berlin’s old age was booking concert tickets for months ahead (I often used to spot him, up in the same box at the Festival Hall). Getting the tickets somehow guarantees that you will hear the music, prolongs your life at least until the last echo of the final chords you have paid to hear dies away. Somehow, this wouldn’t work with the theatre.

It would, however, depend upon successfully remaining in character. When first considering my best-case death scenario (
x
months, time for 200–250 pages), I took this matter for granted. I assumed that I would remain myself to the end, also instinctively insist on being a writer, keen to describe and define the world even as I was leaving it. But the character may be subjected to sudden jolts, magnifications, and distortions in its final stages. A friend of Bruce Chatwin’s first realized that the writer must be seriously ill when he paid for lunch, an action hitherto quite untypical of him. Who can predict the mind’s response to its own short-dated termination?

Chapter 43

Montaigne didn’t die, as he had dreamed, while planting out his cabbage patch. Death came for the sceptic and epicurean, the tolerant deist, the writer of boundless curiosity and learning, while mass was being celebrated in his bedroom: at the exact moment (or so they said) of the elevation of the host. An exemplary death for the Catholic Church—which nevertheless put Montaigne’s works on the Index within a century.

Twenty years ago, I visited his house—or rather, his writer’s tower—outside Bordeaux. Chapel on the ground floor, bedroom on the first, study at the top. Four centuries on, both facts and furnishings were as unverifiable as any philosopher would know them to be. There was a broken chair on which the great essayist may possibly have sat—or if not, on something similar. The bed-room, in the silkily evasive French of the guidebook, was where “nothing forbids us from thinking that this is where he might have died.” The study still had Greek and Latin tags painted on the beams, though they had been many times refreshed; while the thousand-volume library that had been Montaigne’s universe was long dispersed. Even the shelves had gone: all that remained were a couple of D-shaped pieces of metal to which they might have been attached. This seemed properly philosophical.

Just off the bedroom where Montaigne might have expired while perhaps gazing at the elevated host (though nothing forbids us from thinking that his mind was on his cabbages), there was a small platform. From there, the philosopher would have been able to follow mass in the chapel below without interrupting his thoughts. A narrow, angled tunnel, made up of seven steps, offered a fine acoustic and a decent view of the priest. After the guide and the other tourists had moved on, some homage-paying instinct induced me stand on the platform, and then start creeping down this pseudo-staircase. Two steps later, I slipped, and in an instant found myself splayed and sprung against the side walls, trying to prevent myself being shot down this stone funnel into the chapel below. Clamped there, I felt the claustrophobia of a familiar dream—the one where you are lost underground, in some narrowing pipe or tube, in ever-increasing darkness, in panic and in terror. The dream which, even without waking from it, you know is straightforwardly about death.

I have always been suspicious of dreams; or rather, of excessive interest in them. I knew a couple, long and manifestly in love with one another, whose day always began with the wife recounting to her husband the dreams she had entertained that night. They were still doing it, devotedly, in their seventies. I prefer—indeed, treasure—my wife ’s extremely laconic approach to dream-narration. She wakes, and delivers her report, either as gnomic summary—“a bit of a desert”—or pithy critical assessment, such as “Rather confusing,” or “Glad to get out of
that.
” Sometimes description and critique are combined: “Indian dreams, like a long and rambling novel.” Then she goes back to sleep and forgets all about it.

This seems to put dreams into their proper perspective. When I first started writing fiction, I laid down two rules for myself: no dreams, and no weather. As a reader, I had long been irritated by “significant” meteorology—storm clouds, rainbows, distant thunder—just as I was bored by “significant” dreams, premonitions, visitations, and so on. I was even planning to call my first novel
No Weather.
But the book was so long in the writing that eventually the title came to seem coy.

I have death-dreams about as often as you might expect: some burial-oriented, involving subterranean enclosure and narrowing tunnels; others deploying a more active war-movie scenario—of being chased, surrounded, outnumbered, outgunned, of finding myself bulletless, held hostage, wrongly condemned to the firing squad, informed that there is even less time than I imagined. The usual stuff. I was relieved when, a few years back, a thematic variation finally came along: the dream in which I am registering at a suicide hostel in some country tolerant of death-seekers. I have signed the forms, and my wife has agreed—either to join me in the venture, or, more usually, to accompany and help me. However, when I get there, I find the place infinitely depressing—cheap furniture, a shabby bed reeking of past and future occupants, bored apparatchiks treating you as just another item of bureaucratic business. I realize I have made the wrong decision. I don’t want to check out (or even check in), I have made a mistake, life is still full of interest and some small future; yet even as I think this, I am aware that once the process to which I have lent my signature has begun, I cannot back out, and yes, I shall be dead within hours, or even minutes, for now there is absolutely no escape, no possible Koestlerian “clever trick” to help me out.