When I Die: Lessons from the Death Zone

Going to my Grave

When I was recovering from my surgery in Newcastle I began to think once again about arranging my own burial plot. So I called Highgate Cemetery and asked if they had any plots. They did, I was told, and I was given the name of a man to speak to about it. And then, what with one thing and another, I forgot about the idea.

When I was diagnosed as being terminally ill, and told that my death was coming sooner rather than later, I remembered again. I called the number I had been given. The person I had been told to contact had left the cemetery but the man on the end of the phone said he would look after me anyway.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘My name is Victor. I’m the gravedigger.’

Of course I expected Victor to be a six-foot-six giant with a big shovel over one shoulder. And when I met him he turned out to be a six-foot-six giant with a shovel over one shoulder.

Victor Herman deals all the time with people who are dying, and quite often with people like me who are about to die. He is the sexton, and although he has worked at Highgate for twenty-two years, he actually dug his first grave there ten years before that, when he was fourteen. His father had been the head gravedigger there for years and so he and his family were part of the history of the whole place.

Victor and I and Gail wandered around the cemetery a couple of times. He would suggest a spot here or there, but they were not the kind of places I wanted.

I wanted a bigger plot, somewhere that could become almost a communal place for our family and friends. I was looking not so much for a burial plot as a burial place, I suppose, a meeting place, something physical that you could see and connect to.

Victor may be big but he is gentle with it: he was wonderful with Gail. He gave her great comfort because he has had so much experience of dealing with death.

He dealt with us beautifully. It was a wonderful morning and at last we chose a spot.

Finding a physical place for me was a huge step forward. On the one hand it was a place to which people who are still alive can come and connect to me. For my daughters in particular that would be a good thing. And on the other hand it enabled me to see the place where I was going to spend eternity. Here was the place where my family and friends could come to find me.

And perhaps not only people who knew me. There will be people about the place looking at the graves, looking at my grave, so it will be almost a communal meeting point between the dead and the living. It sounds very romantic, I know. But the dead and the living are both part of our lives. It gives me great comfort to know that I will be there.

This morning I stood at my grave and I thought: God, I do feel very, very happy to be going to this place. That is a small victory for a different view of death.

As this process goes on, as death gets closer, my experiences become more and more tense, but also more and more joyful. They are surprising, too. Things happen that I would not have expected to happen. Coincidences occur. I find I have entered a world which is not as I thought it would be. It is much better than I thought it would be. The ground rules, the nature of reality, in this world are different.

I knew it would be special this morning when we went to my grave, and it was. I was photographed at my place of interment. I am now alive but later I will be dead. It was very powerful and led to a whole series of connections that were quite surprising and unexpected.

This morning, I did not feel that I was in a dead place. I did not think this morning that I was in a place from which energy had gone, at which the process of decline was starting. I did not feel that this was somehow the beginning of decay.

Instead I saw that this too was life. It was the taking of us from what we are to being something different. And that, I think, is the process of death.

I had an absolutely wonderful trip yesterday with my two daughters. It did not start that way. I was not feeling well and I was in and out of the car before we began. So we all felt a bit frazzled and tense as we set off. But as we travelled away from London, things changed.

We went to all the places where I used to spend my time as a young boy. We went from one meaningful place to another. We went to my school, to my childhood home, to the place where I used to play football, where I used to play sport.

We had a house on a canal and I remember this canal as always being quite pretty. It was so pretty yesterday when we visited.

We went to my parents’ graves and I told Georgia and Grace, not for the first time, that there is still not a day that goes past that I do not miss them.

Every place we went imparted a certain power to our journey, and so as we went from one to another the feelings became more and more powerful, until by the end we were all in a state of joy. We were suddenly happy as a family and at the end Georgia said: ‘It was the most perfect day.’

And this on the back of a couple of days which had been among the most difficult I have had recently. There was a quality of specialness about that day that would not have been possible were it not that the stakes were so high. It would not have happened were it not for us knowing and accepting that I would die of cancer soon.

My daughters know I am going to die and I know that I am going to die. In those circumstances we are all willing to do something as potentially difficult and upsetting as making this journey together back into my past.

Death gives meaning to life and the knowledge that you are going to die one day gives you the sense that there is meaning in your life. When you are going to die soon, you really do feel the absolute intensity of life. Life becomes completely precious, not just because there is so little of it left but because the actual nature of experience is more fulfilling, more protean than it was before. I feel there are somehow more molecules moving around the room now.

Death is going to happen to everybody, but it is happening to me now.

A few more days passed. We were outside London, enjoying the countryside and bringing the family together as I prepared for the next round of chemotherapy. Over the weekend I noticed I was experiencing a form of breathlessness. I could not walk up the stairs or move quickly or dramatically without having difficulty breathing.

We waited until Tuesday before doing anything about it because that was the day I was due in hospital to start that next round of treatment. The medical staff took one look at me and steered me away from chemotherapy and towards a new diagnosis. I had blood tests and X-rays.

The results were clear. A dangerous level of infection had entered my lungs and there was also widespread inflammation, which was the cause of my breathlessness. It was clear that my body would be unable to cope with the ravages of treatment.

On Thursday 3 November, David Cunningham comes in to see me entirely alone. He leaves his entourage outside. He tells me that it does not look as though the therapies and, in particular, the steroids they have been giving me are having the desired effect. Some of my blood tracings are good, others are not.

I ask him what the worst case is for me now.

Three to five days, he says.

What is the best case?

Three or four weeks.

Just as being told I had three months to live had been a much bigger shock than any bad news I had received before, this new timetable, being told I might die in three days, is another quantum leap.

On hearing previous diagnoses I was uncertain about the future. This time I am not. I know my purpose.

I am endeavouring to be honest about the reality of death. I am trying to make clear its importance and help inspire others as they move towards it.

I know how hard this is to do but I want to try.

In her book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross says that with love this period can be the most fulfilling and extraordinary time of life. I am sure she is right. Death provides the creative tension in everybody’s life, but when you enter the Death Zone the intensity is either overwhelming or extraordinary in its possibilities.

I have no doubt that this pre-death period is the most important and potentially the most fulfilling and the most inspirational time of my life. In this world, conventional time becomes meaningless. You map your course according to the coordinates of emotion and feelings, compassion and love.

I am approaching the door marked Death. What lies beyond it may be the worst of things. But I believe it will be the best of things.