Bryony Gordon
Tessa Jowell and the lost art of dignity
Bryony Gordon
Her refusal to go quietly will have helped many of the terminally ill
In her powerful book about dying, Dr Kathryn Mannix writes that just as midwives assist us in giving birth, so there should be professionals who prepare us for death.
Parents-to-be learn about the various stages of labour so that they are not taken entirely by surprise when things get going. “Similarly,” writes Mannix, “discussing what to expect during dying – and understanding that the process is predictable and usually reasonably comfortable – is of comfort and support to dying people and those who love them.”
And yet in the last national care of the dying audit of hospitals, it was found that fewer than half of terminally ill patients had been told of their fates. Dr Mannix is a palliative care doctor with 40 years of experience. But despite its subject matter, With the End in Mind is an oddly uplifting book; the writer has become intimately acquainted with death, and has made it her mission to bust the taboo that surrounds it, one that is only getting bigger and bigger as science helps us to live longer and longer.
“Yet these welcome healthcare advances can only remediate us up to a point,” writes Mannix. “The pattern of the final days, and the way we actually die, are unchanged.”
Previously, we were familiar with death. It happened in our homes rather than hospitals; we saw death, we touched death, we lived with death. Now, we barely even talk about it.
It is a brave soul who pipes up and confronts the only inevitability that life has to throw at us. This week, one such person was Dame Tessa Jowell. It cannot have been easy to have stood in the House of Lords and deliver her speech on cancer care. The Labour peer has a rare and aggressive brain tumour with a poor prognosis; she is seriously ill, and yet as she spoke she exuded a calm dignity that so many of her colleagues lack.
Baroness Jowell made an impassioned plea for more sharing of information by doctors at the highest levels to combat cancer. But she also highlighted the need for a community to surround patients, being “practical and kind. For while doctors look at the big picture, we can all be part of the human-sized picture”.
The 70-year-old, who helped bring the Olympics to London, concluded by saying: “In the end, what gives a life meaning is not only how it is lived, but how it draws to a close. I hope that this debate will give hope to other cancer patients like me, so that we can live well with cancer, not just be dying of it.”
Watching Dame Tessa, and listening as she was interviewed by Nick Robinson earlier in the week on the BBC’S Today programme, one could not help but be moved – but also inspired. The dying are a group of people we are instinctively scared of – or perhaps that should be for. They are hidden away from public life, in part through physical necessity, but also because of modern cultural taboos. And yet there was nothing frightening about Dame Tessa, nothing at all. Inspiring? Yes. Life-affirming, even? Yes. But frightening? No.
Her stance this week, her refusal to go quietly, will have helped any terminally ill person who has wanted to shout to the world that they are not dead yet. She reminded me of the marvellous Lynda Bellingham, who filmed a farewell edition of Loose Women a week before her death of colon cancer in 2014. “Please don’t cry,” she told the assembled audience. “It will all be fine!” One must imagine that it was, given that she was able to die in the arms of her husband.
In her speech, Baroness Jowell quoted the last words of Seamus Heaney: Do not be afraid. This applies as much to those surrounding a terminally ill patient as it does to the patient themselves.
We have come a long way since the days when cancer was quietly referred to as the C-word, but we still tend to stick our fingers in our ears whenever the inevitable is mentioned. This does us all a disservice. It is only by accepting death that we truly learn how to live.