Indeed, his eyes were closed and his face averted, as if to make doubly sure he wouldn’t see us all gathered there – all those faces that would soon conclusively disappear.
—————
‘[H]e gradually sank into death,’ wrote Joseph Severn, the portraitist, ‘so quiet, that I still thought he slept.’
There he lay…
Two hours had churned by, and we sat in place like art students in class, sizing up a model.
…Not long before I was born my teenage mother used to ‘sit’ at the Ruskin in Oxford. She told me that she passed the hours by ‘pretending to be dead’ – not that she felt at all embarrassed or uncomfortable (she regularly posed nude); no, she relayed the information just to equip me with a trick, or a spell, to make time go fast.
There were muted comments and whispered asides – but nothing that resembled conversation; every now and then one or other of us stealthily and briefly slipped away, to go to the bathroom, to make a phone call, to stretch the legs, to taste some variation in the air…
Around seven I had a smoke with Blue, out in the dusty shrubbery. She struck me as someone quite different from the woman I knew, decidedly reserved or even bashful, but neutrally and unaffectedly so, as if that was her real nature, and all the forthright liveliness I was used to merely belonged to an absent twin.
Days earlier, she told me, Christopher was as usual being prodded and tested and shifted and hoisted, and he said (in a very forceful tone), ‘That’s enough. No more treatment now. Now I want to die.’ He had run out of dry land, and recognised that the time had properly come to make the crossing. These weren’t his last words, not in any formal sense; his last words were a day or two away…
In Houston, even in the winter months, the diurnal temperature seldom drops below sixty-five. Before us, before Blue and me, stretched a fine December evening, and one that looked set to last till midnight…We hurried back up and took our places, as in a gallery or a playhouse, to gaze at a portrait or a motionless mime.
Blue had spoken about Christopher’s coming end dispassionately, almost dismissively. She was getting through it by pretending to be cold.
There was another presence at the death watch, inorganic and at first unregarded, but by now wholly dominant – the point at which all our stares converged.
It was the tall contraption glowering over the far right-hand corner of the bed, and it looked like the innards of an elderly robot, a Bakelite and metal organ tree (stickled together, it seemed, at Crazy Eddie’s discount store): lit-up computer screens, mobile phones, clock radios, pocket calculators, walkie-talkies – each of them heaped one on top of the other, and then studiously titivated, here at MDA, with sacs and vials of nutrients and medicaments. Blood-red, sharp-shouldered digits flashed out their readings.
At eight the blood pressure said 120/80. At nine it said 105/65. It kept on going down.
…Nineteen months ago, when all this began, I used to think, with fearful anticipation, of Auden’s Icarus: ‘the splash, the forsaken cry…Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky’. But now the moment had come I thought of Eliot’s Christ-figure (in ‘Preludes’): ‘I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images, and cling: / The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.’
The chest continued to rise and fall, but shallowly now.
The breathing weakened smoothly – visibly but not audibly. No wheezing, no gasping and gulping, no choking: no struggle, no tremor – nothing sudden.
The continuously undulating line at the base of the heart monitor, like a childish representation of a wavy sea, now stretched itself out into a dead calm.
The widow, after a silence, briskly began to assemble her things, and she rose to her feet, saying,
‘Come on. There’s nothing there now. That,’ she whispered to me, meaning the body, ‘there’s nothing in it any more. It’s just – rubbish.’ As we headed into the corridor she turned and saw something among his belongings that for just a moment made her stride falter. With a sharp intake of breath she gasped out,
‘His…shoes!’
—————
Mortality, which appeared in early 2012, lies on my desk in Brooklyn, here in 2018, and I can say with certainty that it is a valiant and noble addition to the literature of dying.
Christopher’s last words were formulaic (though also in my view characterologically superb). But why are Last Words in general so predominantly second-rate? And I mean the last words of our greatest poets, thinkers, scientists, leaders, visionaries, our supermen and our wonderwomen: why can’t the ne plus ultra of articulate humanity, faced with this defining moment, do a little better?
Henry James (1843–1916) came up with ‘So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.’ This is rhetorically very splendid – last words in the high style. He claimed that his valedictory flourish was spontaneous (his ‘first thought’ as his leg gave way and he embarked on a fall). But the high style, by definition, is never spontaneous – and what’s ‘distinguished’ about falling over? I’d say that James had been working on his last words since about 1870.
The best last words known to me belong to Jane Austen (b. 1775), who was dying (of lymphoma) in unalleviable pain at the age of forty-one. Asked what she needed, she said, ‘Nothing but death.’ This sounds impulsive, unbidden, perhaps even serendipitious; it also sounds both weary and resolute, both impatient and stoical. Not content with that, Austen’s crystallised poeticism – even the ‘but’ plays its part – dramatises a fell reality, because ‘nothing’ and ‘death’, here and elsewhere, are synonyms. ‘Nothing but nothing’ was her meaning.
Otherwise, last words are dross, like the defunct human body. And the words that precede death could hardly be as feeble as they are unless something about death rendered them so. Being impenetrable, death defeats
