Disarming the Grim Reaper… with a silly grin

A darkly pessimistic stroke survivor’s reflections on death? Nothing could be gloomier, you might think. How wrong you would be...

Iopened this book with a mixture of curiosity and prickly hostility. Robert McCrum, former publisher and literary editor, and hugely accomplished author, is today best known for his memoir of a major stroke, the instant classic, My Year Off. Nine years later, when I had my own major stroke, Robert came to visit me: he has become the high priest of insults to the brain.

So, whence the hostility? We all have our private mottos. One of mine is ‘temperament is fate’. By that I mean that our unconscious attitude to the rest of the world, the angle at which we approach daily life, drives everything. I am an unbelieving Scottish Presbyterian optimist: I’m for working very hard while enjoying the pungent loveliness of life.

But Robert is an English pessimist, much darker than I am temperamentally. He is the Robert Burton (Anatomy Of Melancholy) of our times. When he visited me after my stroke he seemed disturbed that I was neither angry nor tearful. When he left, he turned at the door and said: ‘Well, Andrew, never forget the old stroke survivors’ adage.’ I raised my eyebrows, hoping for a chirpy verbal tonic. ‘It’s the second stroke that kills you,’ said Robert as he left.

So when I realised that his new book was a meditation on death, I was steeling myself for 200 pages of dark grey, with the odd splash of black.

That didn’t mean it would be an impossible or unworthy project. We need this kind of book. Like Robert, I have been within a hair’s breadth of dying. Since then I have lived with disability. It’s like shouldering a heavy, awkward pannier when you get up first thing in the morning, and not putting it down again until last thing at night. You have to work at keeping cheerful.

I, too, have reached an age where I find the bony smile of mortality everywhere I look – friends ravaged by disgusting cancers; witty relatives being choked by the pitiless grip of Alzheimer’s; brilliant journalists suddenly snuffed out, far too early, by disease or heart attacks. As Philip Roth, quoted here, famously put it: ‘Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.’

So I agree that we have to think about death and talk about it perhaps rather more than we do. And if that’s so, there can be no better guide than a wise, humane and battered-about writer like McCrum. He has thought deeply, talked widely, read voraciously and experienced much. He took his title from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘Every third thought shall be my grave.’

But observing his somewhat dark view of life, I worried that this extended essay might be unremittingly bleak and that a better title would have been We’re All Doomed.

It certainly isn’t a work of glib optimism. McCrum takes us on a tour of the failing brain, of the terrifying effects of Alzheimer’s, into ghastly stories of cancer and to the heart of the hospice. He is an unflinching teacher of what, when we think about it, we already know. We are only a fall or a tiny eruption of rogue cells away from disaster: ‘The tantalising frontier between wellness and ill-health is like Lewis Carroll’s looking glass. We can step into a nightmare at any moment.’ Ta, Robert.

Yet by the time I had finished this book, I had a silly grin on my face. That was partly because it ends with a happy surprise but, more importantly, because you cannot confront the meaning of death without a refreshed and more vivid understanding of the glory of being alive. McCrum’s awe at the mystery of the human brain is matched by his deep understanding of the consolations of music and literature, and his insistence on the importance of the immediate experience.

He is absolutely right to focus on the arrogant solipsism of the baby-boomer generation, who have come to believe that everything (even old age and death) can be controlled and managed by technology.

And his scepticism about the young is not mere grumpy-old-man-ism: ‘With the onset of these later years... the fragile self finds that “less is more” and learns to moderate its youthful egotism. Young people think they are immortal and that the world revolves around them. Older people know their future is not infinite and also that they must take their place in the scheme of things. Among the important lessons about ageing is a new appreciation of simple pleasures: the joy of friendship and the satisfaction of small victories... Being alive in the world brings its own rewards: the wind in your face on a blustery spring day or the silver magic of summer moonlight.’

Our culture, with the long decline of religion, doesn’t like to talk about death or indeed, limitations of any kind. Everything can be sorted – bought – mended. Except death can’t be. At times the book, always lucidly and clearly written, feels like a kind of samizdat pamphlet – secret news to be passed around surreptitiously on the edges of parks. Which is bonkers, really.

Particularly since his message is urgently life-affirming. McCrum quotes the playwright Dennis Potter about how it feels to be very close to the end: ‘Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous.’ This is very close to what the pollster and political philosopher Philip Gould called ‘the death zone’. I vividly remember Potter’s ecstatic insistence that he had rediscovered the beauty of ordinary things in his final weeks.

In a book saturated with telling literary colour, one of McCrum’s favourite writers is Montaigne, who makes the case for his whole project: ‘Let us disarm Death of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as Death... And thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves.’

As I closed it, having stared pretty steadily at extinction, I found myself encouraged and fortified.

So, really, thank you, Robert.

‘I feared this might be a bleak book yet by the time I had finished, I had a silly grin on my face’

Craig Brown is away