The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘I have tried to step away from regrets. It has made dying easier’
When Simon Boas, 46, wrote to his local paper about his terminal cancer, his positive outlook struck a chord with readers. Now word has spread and his cheerful stoicism is touching people across the UK. Louise Carpenter reports
A letter called “A Beginner’s Guide to Dying” by a 46-year-old Jersey-based man with terminal cancer has been dropping into inboxes all over Britain in the past couple of weeks. Thousands have shared it, with the words “Read this!”
Its author, Simon Boas, given six to 12 months to live in February, has since read from the letter on BBC Radio 4. “The prognosis is not quite ‘Don’t buy any green bananas’, he told listeners cheerily, “but it’s pretty close to ‘Don’t start any long books’.”
Quoting Emperor Hirohito, who announced in 1945 after two Japanese cities were obliterated by nuclear bombs “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage”, Boas said of the 27 tumours now in his lungs in addition to the throat cancer, missed by doctors: “Well, I’m sorry to have to announce that my cancer situation has also developed not necessarily to my advantage.”
At a time when the world is ravaged by wars, death and famine, Boas’s cheerful stoicism seems to have touched the nation: “I’ve existed for 46 years! It’s as churlish as winning the
£92 million EuroMillions jackpot and then complaining bitterly when you discover that there’s another winning ticket and you’ll only get half the money… We should be dazzled by our good fortune – dancing on the tables every day.”
Since his letter was first published in the Jersey Evening Post, Boas, who is the executive director of Jersey Overseas Aid, has been contacted by many hundreds of people. “The response has been wonderful and it’s brought me such happiness to know I have made a difference,” he explains when we meet. “I resolved at the beginning to write back to everybody. But it’s taking quite a lot out of the day now.”
Some of the people who reach out to him are dying themselves; some are on a cancer journey; some are grieving; some are philosophising about a good life and a good death; some are re-examining faith; some are fans of his humour and his kindness. Celebrants too have requested permission for his words to be a consolatory text at funerals.
Last October, after treatment, Boas spent two weeks in hospital with pneumonia: “It really helped me see the world through a Stoic lens.” His stoicism is not of the “chin up, old boy” sort, where pain is left unconfronted. It is more philosophical, a rare modern-day example of the teaching of the Stoics, who began in Athens in the late fourth century BC, and who believed a life of joy can be attained with the correct attitude to the universe. It’s not what is missing, but what we have already or have had. “How lucky it is to have lived at all,” Boas writes. “Just for us to be born… is like hitting the jackpot every day of the year.”
Coloured Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags are draped around the garden fence of the home he shares with his French wife, Aurelie, 41, in Trinity, north of Jersey’s capital. When strangers draw up trying to find him, wanting to thank him, the flags are a helpful clue.
He opens the door of their cottage and immediately flings his arms around me, a strong physical embrace echoing the spiritual comfort he has already dispensed. “If I can’t change the cards, I’ll play them as well as I can,” he says, showing me into the sitting room.
His work colleagues are devastated. Sometimes, he orders everybody to down tools and head to the pub with him at 3pm. “I want to skid into my grave on two wheels.”
Jersey Overseas Aid focuses on six countries – Nepal, Ethiopia, Malawi, Zambia, Rwanda and
Sierra Leone – for development work, all of which Boas visits, as well as funding emergencies such as the humanitarian crisis following the bombing of Ukraine. Now he will never go to Africa again, nor see through aid projects he has planned and to which he has allocated millions in funds. “But I’m happy if I never leave this lovely community in Jersey. There’s a nice hospice here for me.”
Jersey’s States Assembly is scheduled to debate proposed legislation on May 21 after becoming the first parliament in the British Isles to decide “in principle” that assisted dying should be allowed. “I’d like the option even if I don’t use it,” says Boas. “I don’t see any value in increasing length at the expense of quality.”
In three weeks’ time, he will discover if immunotherapy will extend his life by a year or even more. He used to be an atheist, but no longer. “It’s a terrible cliché to get terminal cancer and suddenly start believing in an afterlife. Now I don’t see death as necessarily being the indelible full stop to things.”
He has planned a few songs and readings for his funeral (and a couple of funny jokes): “I’m working out with Aurelie where I end up. I don’t care, but she’s a Catholic and I think she wants a burial and a grave, and we need to think where she will be.”
Boas grew up in Winchester, Hampshire. His father, a businessman, retired early. His mother was a language book editor and worked for the Citizens
Advice Bureau. “Both were always charitably minded, working in soup kitchens and at the food bank. They let me go off on my first aid convoy to Bosnia when I was only 16 and I worked in a night shelter while at school.”
As a boy, he was a scholar at Winchester College, three years above the prime minister. Boas exhibits the very best of that school, known for fostering intellectual curiosity and eccentricity.
He has been reading voraciously: the Stoics, Buddhist teachings, the contemplative traditions, the work of the Christian monk Thomas Merton. He studied English at Oxford before dropping out in his final year following a car accident, which made him rethink his life. After learning Arabic, he returned to studying, reading international policy analysis at Bath University.
Leaving Oxford was perhaps the first sign of an unconventional path: he has since witnessed rocket strikes, gun battles, been shot in the leg, pulled his own tooth out, been detained on a trumped-up murder charge in Vietnam, which he got himself off by singing in a brothel. And on it goes. He has lived and travelled all over the globe.
Much of Boas’s professional career working for an NGO has been spent in the Palestinian territories: for the Palestine Economic Policy Research Unit; as special adviser to the Minister of Planning for the Palestinian National Authority; as head of the UN’s food and agriculture office in Gaza; followed by various Civil Service roles before moving to Jersey in 2016. He has sung in a choir on three continents, is still a Samaritan and a volunteer Jersey police officer.
“I sometimes feel high with happiness and I do check myself that I’m not in denial,” he explains. “There is just so much to be grateful for. Knowing I’m dying, I can feel sadness and joy and anger all at once. And I’ve been lucky. I’ve always tried to step away from regrets and expectations. It has made dying easier. I’m leaving life loving it and everybody in it. Knowing I’m dying means I see the joy.”
The kitchen is full of cut flowers, tulips in pinks and purples and the prettiest pinkand-white-striped camellias, grown by Aurelie, whom he met in 2008 on a bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. She had just begun an internship with a Palestinian news agency as part of a masters in journalism. Within two days they were housemates.
The only time Simon’s eyes fill
‘Just for us to be born is like hitting the jackpot every day of the year’
with tears is not about how doctors missed the tumour in his throat back in 2022, but contemplating Aurelie’s future without him, and of his parents. He has a younger sister, Julia, a therapist. “I’m sure my parents are having long dark teatimes of the soul. They want to be strong for me, though.”
He first experienced pain in his throat in the summer of 2022, and difficulty swallowing. He was treated for acid reflux. He returned to the GP and was referred to an ear, nose and throat consultant. A camera detected swelling, attributed to the effects of reflux. Symptoms persisted. In February 2023 he returned for more investigations. An email went astray. He was diagnosed with stage-four throat cancer in August 2023.
Last autumn Simon and Aurelie moved to live with his parents in Winchester for his chemo and radiotherapy at Southampton Hospital. There was still hope then, albeit not full recovery, but he had by then resolved to be optimistic.
The pneumonia struck in October. In January this year, scan results were late coming. On the day he was called in to be told of the lung cancer, Aurelie was in Paris on a long-planned trip with girlfriends. “I would never have gone if I’d known,” she says. The delay was due to the bleak prognosis.
He was given the news at Jersey General Hospital. “I’d already stopped planning my 50th but the timescale [of death] was much sooner than I imagined.” He was with his best friend from Winchester. “I cried a lot and we drank a bottle of gin and went on long walks. I also wrote ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Dying’ immediately. The worst was knowing that I had to tell Aurelie.”
He told her in the car, at Jersey Airport, when he picked her up three days later. They took themselves off to her family house in Brittany to be alone and to process. “I didn’t fit the profile,” says Simon, who has smoked on and off since school. Throat cancer is experienced by non-smokers too. “If I’d been 60, it’s the first thing they’d have thought of.”
“That’s how the doctor defended himself,” says Aurelie.
“People make mistakes in every profession,” says Boas. “If I was in rural Nepal, I’d probably still be on paracetamol. That I even had a doctor is pretty lucky. Billions in the world don’t.”
If immunotherapy buys more time, he is thinking about expanding “A Beginner’s Guide to Dying” into a book. In the meantime, the couple have two more trips to France planned, next month and in July. Pleasure, though, is found at home, spending time with Aurelie, going for walks with their dog Pippin and drinking Muscadet with friends. “I’m lucky not to have too much of a bucket list.
I’ve climbed the Pyramids and done big motorcycle trips, but you only have to do one tiny thing to make an impact. We’ve all led significant lives.”
Read Simon Boas’s letter at jerseyeveningpost.com