We have a frequent dark dialogue, my nearest and dearest and I, in which they ask, “Can I get you anything?” and I say, “Yes, a gun.” Sometimes it’s a one-bullet day, sometimes it’s two. It’s not that I’m preoccupied with death; it’s just that I feel I’ve moved house and live on the same street. One of those smart townhouse developments, where you don’t talk to your neighbours.
We keep our distance, obviously, death and me, for I’ve absolutely no intention of ringing its doorbell. But, put it this way – I know now what it looks like, and it doesn’t scare me. I’m a lot wiser and more relaxed about discussing it. And I think it’s time we all did.
Anyway, I know this magazine is about eating, drinking, laughing, thinking and looking stylish, but that’s precisely the point: we need to ensure we can carry on doing those things right to the end. Because that end is going to come, chaps. Nothing’s surer. We need to plan, even if, hopefully, it’s decades away. Home or hospice. Magnolia or Clay Beige. Orchids or daisies. Vulgar bling, council crem or woodland chic. Pain or pain-free. What dying needs is an injection of fashion, vision, dignity and style.
Whatever our beliefs, pearly gates or otherwise, we need to commit to choice and discernment. For – and I speak with authority – there are many things worse than being dead, including prolonged suffering, loss of function, or years incarcerated with dementia wearing synthetic cardigans and listening to Robbie Williams singing Angels, and it’s up to us to manage this fact.
Recently, I saw a TV advert for Cancer Research UK, the payoff line of which was that everyone, one day, will be cured of cancer. Nice marketing, but specious guff, when statistics show more of us are dying of cancer precisely because we’re not dying of other things. Hard as it is to accept, we are still all going to die of something. For, as one US academic dryly puts it, the 50-year experiment to medicalise dying has failed.
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I admit I’m a hardliner: I recently contributed to a new book, I’ll see Myself Out, Thank You: 30 Views of Assisted Suicide. I want to see humane legislation on assisted suicide. A large majority of people agree – although, of course, we all hope to avoid such tough stuff by dying peacefully and suddenly, mobility and marbles intact, aged 90-odd, drinking champagne, wearing Chanel, laughing at outrageous jokes and making our grandchildren blush.
But even if we can’t, we can nevertheless maintain standards. If we are going to get a friend to bump us off at a pre-determined point, say, when we can’t remember where the gin’s kept, then let the smothering be done with the most colourful of cushions; and spliffs and cocktails all round.
As well as style, dying also needs objectivity and academic research. And to those ends there is a brand new hero: David Clark, a professor, basically, of the art of a good death, at the University of Glasgow. He’s just started the first proper study in the world to examine how we die and what we do about it. Suicide aside, this is a contentious area between palliative care and the hospice movement, with strong moral crosswinds. Do we want US-style for-profit hospices? Are they worse than an underfunded NHS?
Professor Clark also plans a radical care campus, a kind of university for the old, providing everything from independent housing to sheltered accommodation (halls of residence again? Yee-ha!) to long-term hospice facilities. All on the same location, a community allowing people to maintain their own way of life, and propping them up with specialist health and dementia services. There will be shops, cafés and all kinds of space for learning, mingling and, hopefully, having fun. It’s brilliant that someone is at last being open and creative (more details on endoflifestudies.academicblogs.co.uk/).
The point is, I love my life, rubbish though it frequently is. Never have I appreciated precious things more, or craved to remain here so intensely: being with the people I love, the places, sights, smiles, smells. All I want on my death certificate, when I do go, is a diagnosis saying I died of happy old age. And I’m trying hard.
Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010