Let's talk about death, 'bay-bee'

Damian Lewis can dance. I mean as in seriously, seriously move.

I know this because I met him at a friend’s house party in the early noughties and he did it with me - full on leg-shaking, hip-swaying, arm-raising, rug-cutting, shape-throwing, move-busting - danced. It was flamboyant, flirtatious, and So. Much. Fun.

I always had a smile to myself after that whenever I came across Mr Lewis on the telly or in the press. A little mental chuckle at the uncomplicatedly happy memory of our cavorting round my mate’s big basement kitchen for a few hours - a moment - once.

Until recently.

Damian’s latest press appearance was a by-line in the Sunday Times last weekend; a written tribute to his wife, the mother of his children, and magnificently talented actress, Helen McCrory - who has died, aged 52.

He spoke of a woman who shone in her last weeks of life and left those who loved her with strength and gratitude alongside broken hearts. ‘Don’t be sad,’ Helen McCrory told her children, knowing she was soon to die ‘...because I’ve lived the life I wanted to.’ How extraordinarily generous and courageous. And how devastating that she is gone.

The same weekend I learned that a local boy, with a rare, aggressive leukaemia, on whose behalf our neighbourhood had helped fundraise for potentially life-saving treatment available only in Singapore, had also died. A day after his 17th birthday. A Whatsapp message arrived late last Saturday from a friend of his family, breaking the news. It shared a blog his father kept throughout his son’s treatment - writing for therapy - in which he spoke of the ‘nobleness and divinity’ with which he had confronted the disease. It was a deeply moving and powerful tribute in the face of the cruellest loss. Seventeen.

And too, last weekend, the funeral took place of the Duke of Edinburgh who died recently, aged 99 - two months shy of his century. Would he and the Queen have quipped once over the prospect of her sending him a congratulatory message on reaching 100. Of course they would. So few of us get as far as that remarkable milestone. What a long, eventful life. What an enduring presence. No more.

Maybe it was the lateness of the hour when that dreadful Whatsapp message dropped, the darkness of the night, the wine imbibed, the candle-lit kitchen, flickering - but those three distinct deaths over one weekend, of people I knew of, but not personally - one on the cusp of life, one in her prime, one at the end of an unarguably ‘good innings’ - made death seem somehow, momentarily...palpable. Like smoke weaving and spiralling between us, extinguishing little lights.

It’s happened more this past year, death - roughly 127,000 times more - but still in an average year, outside the parameters of a slaughterous pandemic, around half a million people die in the UK. Death is the one thing beyond being born that we will all experience. Dying is every bit a part of living, albeit living’s last act. Yet we rarely discuss it.

The closest I’ve got to talking about death is swapping funeral playlists over a strong cocktail at a plush bar. It’s revealing and surprisingly funny (for the record Nina Simone, Feeling Good currently tops mine) but scarcely preparatory.

We don’t deal with death or bereavement until it affects us personally - till it hits us like a truck and rips the air from our lungs. We avoid it, we hush it up, we change its language and call it ‘passing.’ In an increasingly secular society where over 50% of the UK population said in a 2018 British Social Attitudes survey that they did not belong to any religion - where exactly are we ‘passing’ to?

Perhaps the enigma of death intimidates us. Death is both life’s one certainty and its greatest mystery. We know it will happen, but the how, when, and where are a secret only revealed up close. A secret about which - unlike most others - we have little curiosity.

It is a deeply upsetting subject, of course: the death, the no longer being, of those we love. Is there a way we can ready ourselves for the inevitable, arm ourselves with some small degree of emotional or practical preparedness for what is coming to us all - in both starring role and audience participation capacity.

School children learn about the hormonal turbulence of adolescence in PSHE education but is there an arena in which they or we are encouraged to acknowledge the chaos of grief before we meet it head on? Or seek to understand better the admin around death?. What you do…?

In Scotland a petition was submitted to Parliament at the end of last year by parents urging Government to introduce compulsory bereavement education into the school curriculum. Not teaching about death closes off an opportunity to talk about it, they argue, with the result that children learn it is a subject not to be discussed - questions go unasked, feelings get repressed, and society suffers in the long run.

Many end-of-life specialists want conversations about death to happen earlier, too. “We need to de-catastrophise death,..” says Dr Kathryn Mannix - a palliative care consultant whose book: With the End in Mind explores death through stories taken from her four decades of clinical practice - “give it a day-to-day vocabulary that we can all use. Ultimately we need to make death another part of living.”

In a healthcare system where most of our energies are focused on prolonging life and a society where we’re obsessed with preserving youth there could be lessons for us all in thinking differently about the end.

Or as Saul Bellow put it - so much better - in his 1975 novel, Humboldt’s Gift:

'Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything'.

Image by Daniel Levis Pelusi