Opinion

He was on the footpath ahead of me, limping a little from age.

“Escape is futile,” I called out, or some similar facetiousness. He turned and smiled and waited ‘til I came alongside and
we carried on down the hill.

We said the how-are-yous and mentioned the weather, and then, unusually with him, a pause. He has the sharpest mind, reads widely and reflects on what he reads, and though he is nearer to 80 than 70, he retains a curiosity about the world and a sense of comic absurdity. I see him rarely but relish his company.

“So, what’s keeping you busy?” I asked, hoping to prompt some of his wit, his ability to surprise.

“Oh,” he said, “reading, writing a bit, pottering.”

It was an uncharacteristically vague response. He is a man who knows that conversation thrives on honest detail, and broad banalities are anathema.

But then as we went on down the road, he turned to look at me and said “you know about…” and he named his partner of many years, his wife in all but name.

I said I didn’t. But from the form in which he put the question, its meaning was unmistakable. Something catastrophic had happened. As it turned out, she was dying of cancer.

“I keep having these wavering conversations,’ he said, ‘not knowing whether people know.”

I said what one says, that I was sorry and so on. It’s the formula we use to stave off the hardest news. Death retains the power to stun. We distance ourselves with words, because the dying and those associated with them are lepers. We instinctively want them elsewhere, offstage, away from us, the living. They are unlucky charms.

(The dying can connive in this. A woman I knew some years ago went down very fast with cancer. She rang me shortly after being diagnosed. Was there anything I could do? No, no, she said, “And please don’t visit. I don’t consider dying a spectator sport.” And, of course, I was grateful.)

Once we had got past the awkwardness of the news, of the stark truth, he brightened, after a fashion. He hadn’t lost his curiosity, his attention to detail.

“Yesterday,” he said, “I asked her how she was feeling, and she said, ‘I’d say happy, if I didn’t know I was dying’.”

“We know we’re going to die,” he went on, “but in truth, we don’t really know it until we are. Until then it’s merely acknowledging, granting a hypothetical case. Knowing for real is different. Knowing is knowing.”

I told him that when I was seven years old I had a private conviction that I was exempt from mortality. It seemed simply impossible that I would die. I didn’t tell anyone. I just knew. But gradually the conviction faded.

He said that in contrast, at a similar age he had realised mortality applied not just to others but to him as well. “And I begged my father to tell me it wasn’t so, that I wasn’t going to die. Well, my father was a weak-willed man. But you could hardly blame him. I was sobbing. And besides, what was there to gain? But even though I let myself be consoled, I still sort of knew he was lying, however much I tucked the knowledge away out of sight.”

It was clear that he was pleased to be speaking truthfully about the hardest subject in the world, the subject that had just walked in through his front door and taken over his life and thoughts. He mentioned Philip Larkin. Larkin lived his life more in death’s shadow than most of us. He wrote of the reminders that spike through our daily calm – a wailing ambulance, the death of a pet, the hugeness of a hospital.

Of how we “sense the solving emptiness, that lies just under all we do”, but also of the ways we fend it off. And I quoted a line I have always admired: “Conceits and self-protecting ignorance congeal to carry life.”

And then we reached a junction and I wished him well and shook his hand and cupped his shoulder and then he went left and I went straight on.