'We must make friends with the necessity of dying': Why a brush with death gave me back my life
- Robert McCrum embarks on a quest to explore life and death in new book
- More than two decades since his stroke he begins contemplating mortality again
- His fasinating encounters inspires others to never give up or lose hope
Society
EVERY THIRD THOUGHT — ON LIFE, DEATH AND THE END GAME
by Robert McCrum (Picador £14.99)
Robert McCrum was only 42, and at the height of his career in publishing and literary journalism, when he was felled by the stroke that was to transform his life.
That was 23 years ago and afterwards McCrum found himself living permanently ‘in the shadow of death’. He knew that after the colossal shock to his system, and the year-long recovery, he could ‘never go back to my old self’.
Once you are brought face-to-face with the end of life, you expect it all the time.
He calls it ‘the endgame’ — the process to which we are all subject; the moving escalator carrying us remorselessly towards a final breath.
McCrum’s quest in this book is to make sense of all these thoughts, to remind us all ‘there are no privileges or exemptions’, so we must live each day in the knowledge that it is one step towards the grave.
Robert McCrum embarks on a quest to explore life and death after gaining afresh contemplation of mortality after turning 60 (stock image)
Do I hear you murmur that this is too depressing? No, on the contrary. To the wisest ones, the idea of mortality acts as an electric shock to body, mind and spirit, telling us to seize the time, jolting us into the well-lived life.
This engaging and honest book was triggered by an unexpected fall three years ago. McCrum tripped and fell in a London street and was taken to hospital, had tests and, eventually, went home.
But he noticed that ‘something had changed’. More than two decades after the stroke, and having turned 60, McCrum began to contemplate mortality afresh.
Like Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest, he vows: ‘Every third thought shall be my grave’ — yet, paradoxically, that is the basis for a narrative full of vigour, even (sometimes) black humour.
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McCrum takes us through one year of reading, thinking, weighing up the dire statistics on dementia and other threats — and talks to individuals who have also found themselves on the interface between death and life, through personal experience or through work.
The format works: it is like wandering around with a wise peer, eavesdropping on his conversations and enjoying his literary quotations. With the distinguished British neurologist Andrew Lees, he discusses the death-in-life that is Alzheimer’s disease and continues this theme with world-famous brain surgeon (and bestselling author of Do No Harm) Henry Marsh.
What is consciousness? What happens when the brain fails? Are we still human? All the expertise of two brilliant men cannot answer every question — but Lees and Marsh stress the importance of exercise to keep the brain healthy.
EVERY THIRD THOUGHT — ON LIFE, DEATH AND THE END GAME by Robert McCrum (Picador £14.99)
McCrum talks to friends whose lives have been interrupted by the threat of ill-health or death, and who can no longer push the Grim Reaper to the back of their minds.
He considers the idea of ‘the good death’, looks at the ever-expanding literature of death and dying and shows (again and again) that all the evidence — factual, personal and literary — demon-strates the truth of Sigmund Freud’s dictum: ‘We must make friends with the necessity of dying.’ What choice is there?
In the course of a fascinating conversation about war, loss, survival and literature, the Freudian psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips points out that ‘loss and mourning are integral to our development’ and ‘death is at the heart of psychoanalysis . . .’
Of all McCrum’s encounters, I found this one the most uplifting, Phillips’ positive conviction that ‘there will be more possibilities when we are 70’ was music to my ears.
One example, Clive James, is the still-living proof that we must never give up. The brilliant writer and critic has been dying for quite a while now — in 2013, ‘the world’s press gave James the last rites’, since his demise from leukaemia and emphysema was thought to be imminent. But the irrepressible Aussie went on stubbornly clinging to a physically impaired existence. He wrote scintillating criticism and the best poetry of his life, gave more interviews and delighted friends with the coruscating brilliance of an intelligence all the more powerful as the body declined.
There are those who might think Every Third Thought too full of ‘names’ — yet, to me, McCrum’s encounters with the famous and the not-so-famous serve to underline the memento mori message of the medieval ‘Dance Of Death’ illustrations: that rich and poor, renowned and humble alike will all face the same fate eventually.
But right at the end of the book, after we have heard about the sad end of his marriage, McCrum leaves us with an unexpected and tantalising glimpse of a new relationship in his life. It just goes to show that you must never give up, never lose hope.
