Why a brush with death gave me back my life
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 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.
Do I hear you murmur 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, 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 the 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.
McCrum takes us through one year of reading, thinking, weighing up the dire statistics on dementia and other threats — and talks to individuals who’ve also found themselves on the interface between death and life, via personal experience or 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 neurologist Andrew Lees, he discusses 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.
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.