Good death

So, farewell, then, Keith Floyd. Others have celebrated your cooking and your maverick and disastrous lifestyle. It is the custom of dull people to envy tortured souls who hit the heights and plumb the depths. In truth, it was only sometimes fun being you. You taught us much, though, about what a marvellous thing the human spirit can be when unhitched from judiciousness.

While others celebrate the life, it behoves the Good Funeral Guide to celebrate the death, for here, too, Keith Floyd has much to teach us. He made it look easy. Enviable. We’d all like to go like that, with a bellyful of oysters and partridge washed down with a selection of fine wines. In the words of Rabbie Burns, “If there’s another world he lives in bliss; / If there is not, he made the best of this.”

He was only 65, his life shortened, perhaps, by reckless boozing and far too many fags. We can hear the lifestyle police, the virtue-riddled rectitudinous pleasure-poopers, tsk-tsk-ing as they do when almost anyone dies these days, as if death were a self-inflicted alternative to immortality, despite the fact that even the virtuous, some of them, die young for no good reason, as if death ever did reason.

We’ve never lived longer and we’re supposed to feel very pleased about this. The government takes great, self-congratulatory pride in it. But at what cost? If we follow the puritanical precepts of the lifestyle police there’s now every chance that our virtuous, pulse-nourished bodies will outlive our blameless, dementia-raddled brains by years and years and years and years of incontinent bewilderment. Are we living longer or merely lingering longer?

There’s a lot of talk these days about the good death. Why? Because dying has become so protracted and horrible. Because it’s never before taken so long to succumb to the illness that’ll do us in. As a result there have probably never been so many alive who earnestly desire to depart in peace, or whose death is earnestly desired by those who love them. Never before has there been so much talk about assisted dying. Never before has death been so feared—and for good reason.

Yes, we understand all too bleakly that our end will likely be a difficult rearguard action protracted by the helpful, often urgent intervention of brilliant medics. If you have spent time by the bed of a dying person, you know that keenly.

Keith Floyd’s life teaches us that the more fully we live, the better we die; that rather than eke out our days on a diet of self-denial we should use them up with gusto, in a spirit of recklessness born of an understanding that Reaper G is as likely to cull the good as spare the wicked; that we know not the day nor the hour. It’s death, dammit, that makes life precious.

Keith Floyd was felled by a heart attack at the end of a bloody good day. Among his last words were: “I haven’t felt this well for ages.”

For all that, the paramedics still spent a fruitless and possibly brutal 45 minutes trying to revive him.

Farrah Fawcett, Charlie’s Angel star in the 70s, she of the much copied hairstyle, wants to die on camera.

She was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006. The camera has been rolling since then. It has captured highs, like when the tumour is briefly found to have disappeared, and lows, such as when doctors push long needles through her rib cartilage and inject chemicals directly into her liver tumours. When they do that she winces and cringes in pain. One sequence follows her in a wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket, injecting herself with painkillers with a bowl on her lap to vomit into.

Why is she doing it? To highlight the need for early detection and more research. Shades of Jade.

Last Wednesday I went to the inaugural get together of a coalition of interested parties to promote public awareness of death, dying and bereavement. The idea is to get people talking about the D-Word. Only a third of us do. People die and no one has any idea even if they wanted to be buried or cremated. It’s quite common. If we are more open about death, so the theory goes, the less frightened we shall be, the more accepting of its naturalness. The purpose of the coalition is “to make a good death the norm”.

Talking about things always beats not talking about them. We are presently lost for words when talking to dying people, their partners and families, and we are almost as clueless when talking to the bereaved. We are all helpless bystanders of one another’s catastrophes. Pathetic, really. Yes, something ought to be done. We all nodded. We’ve thought this many times.

And yet, and yet… There was something about the bright-eyedness of this assembly of some pretty high-powered people that made me begin to reconsider. That process was accelerated when the marketing man got up to speak. Someone spoke of circles of life and I could only think of downhill trajectory, crash and burn.

Who’d want to talk about death any more than they have to? Making a good death the norm can’t be made to happen by happy straplines, only by superior analgesia. The good death is an invention of the generation that used to wear flowers in it its hair.

We have a duty to talk about death. But it’s a puritanical and an invidious duty. Because the chances are that our own death will be, in Betjeman’s words, “A losing fight with frightful pain / Or a gasping fight for breath.” We know that. Ask Farrah.

Yes, it is grown up to talk about our own death. It is also grown up to know what we’re talking about. But there’s really not a lot to say.

Spit it out, close your mind and crack on. We have much to be frightened of. Que sera…

However you spin it, death is pants.