In this novel by Margaret Lane I am reading, A Smell of Burning (1965) there is a character called Lytton who has recently survived an operation for cancer and who regularly talks to the other characters about how his time is short. However, at the deepest level, and it has been like this for him since childhood, there is an “unshakeable disbelief” in his coming death. It is inconceivable. When he makes the dramatic announcements about his mortality, he is, in a sense, playing a part. Part of him knows that the death of which he speaks – his death – is inconceivable.
My sister died in her early 40s from cancer and in the lead-up to that event she was frequently outspoken about her coming death and her funeral arrangements. She even welcomed the end and wished it would come sooner, because life was so hard and so depressing. And yet, one night, in her hospice bed, when she came out of her morphine-induced semi-coma, during the very last days, she told us that she was not terminal yet, it had not got that serious. Perhaps she shared the disbelief of the character Lytton in Margaret Lane’s novel.
Certainly, I share it. I know that my life is drawing towards an end. I realise it could go on for ten or fifteen years more, or, perhaps more likely, it could end within a few years, perhaps even a few months. And yet I cannot face that reality because, at the deepest level, I simply cannot believe it. If I ever experience a moment when I know for sure that I am going to die, then I imagine that my reaction will be one of utter shock. The sort of astonishment you feel when something really fundamental about the world turns out not to be the case. The look on a child’s face when she is first struck by a loving parent.
Living in involuntary denial of death is a state of delusion, not something one would wish on oneself. But how to make death the reality for me that it is, I cannot figure out.
