Introduction.
I had the idea for writing this book almost exactly nineteen years ago in January 2005. I was a mere stripling of fifty-six. What did I know? Death was abstract, yet real. It happened to other people, right? The concept of it really happening to me was unreal. Yet death had touched me, indeed, touched me hard. Both my parents were dead and that had really screwed me up. More of that later. My sister’s first husband had died at a ridiculously young age, just twenty-two. Two very close friends had died. Then there were numerous colleagues and acquaintances: life was full of death. I thought I had enough to write a book about death.
Yet, even though these deaths affected me, and I mourned the loss, there was still an air of unreality. It was as if I was suspended from really accepting the certainty of my own death. Even though I could rationally accept the fact that I was going to die there was an expectation that life would go on the same. Death wasn’t real. It would occur at some point in the distant future. Every night I went to sleep in the expectation that I would open my eyes on the same universe again tomorrow. The idea that I might close my eyes and never open them again never really crossed my mind. That seemed way off down the road. I was fit, hale and hearty with much life and love to give. My life was full. I had plans zooming off into the future. True – I’d had a couple of health scares, a few close calls. Haven’t we all? They give us something to brag about. But their inconsequence of those episodes only served to reinforce my own view. Death was an abstract, distant event that happened to other people.
Back to that idea of the book. For some reason I thought, despite this, I would write a book chronicling my own death. I knew that it was going to be an ongoing project, not one I’d write in one go as I wasn’t dying yet. None-the-less I was intrigued by death. I reasoned that as the first signs of my death arose I would write about them. I became quite excited by the idea.
Why did death seem so distant? It could strike me down at any moment. I knew that. When I considered the subject I realised that I thought about death quite a lot. Yet it still remained unreal. My own brushes with death had scared me but I’d come through them. Perhaps, despite my assertions to the contrary, I hadn’t fully accepted that it was going to happen to me? I’d pushed that thought of my own death down the road. In my head I’d confront that when something happened, when I had a symptom or two or some crisis. The problem with about that is when a crisis happened there might not be time to plan or sort business out. What would happen to all my ‘stuff’? Was it fair to dump dealing with all that on the wife and kids? Probably not?
But that wasn’t the idea behind the book. The idea was to detail my thoughts and feelings about death especially if I started, as I imagined would happen at some time, to begin to get symptoms of a serious illness. What would that feel like? How would I cope with it? Could I write about it?
This was going to be my diary of death.
Another big reason as to why I had decided to write the book, this book, was that in our society, at this moment in its sanitised version of reality, death was the final taboo. When I mentioned death people shuddered and grimaced. When I mentioned this book they found the idea macabre and repugnant. So I knew that it wasn’t looking destined to be a popular subject. None-the-less I thought it was important to do.
There used to be big taboos concerning sex and religion but they have largely been circumvented – mainly because people wrote about them. Neither sex nor religions have the same shock value as they once had. We can write fuck or have a character bad-mouthing Jesus without it causing too much of a furore. Swear words and blasphemy don’t, apart from with the ultra-brainwashed and prudish, cause too much of a stir. But death, death we do not want to confront. It’s far too depressing. We retreat from mentioning it. We have conveniently removed death from view. While obsessed with war and disasters, violence and murder, we are careful not to allow the camera to stray on to mangled bodies. We prefer to see survivors being pulled from the wreckage and rubble and the wounded being carted off for treatment. The dead and mangled are off limits. We’re alright with numbers. Five hundred thousand Russian soldiers slaughtered. They’re numbers, not real people. Another hundred children killed in Israeli bomb strikes in Gaza. They are not real. We will only see the little bundles being lowered into the ground or carried by distraught parents. We see rows of manicured graves but won’t see the ravaged bodies of the dead. We see injured people in the hospitals but not death. Far too gruesome. Death is carefully airbrushed out of sight.
That has not always been the case.
A few hundred years ago death was common and real. People had large families and expected a good percentage of them to die in childhood. People were used to holding their dead loved ones, being with them, tending to dead bodies and burying them. We hadn’t yet farmed it out to faceless professionals. Death was real. Life expectancy was short. Many were the dire diseases, the viruses and bacteria that preyed upon us. Few were the remedies. Death was an everyday reality. Religion was bloated on that grief and fear; indeed, religion relied on that fear and actively sought to exploit it. Sermons about the inevitability of death were mandatory and designed to terrify the life out of everyone. Following your death either angels would come to raise you up to heaven or demons would drag you down to the brimstone fires of the underworld. Heaven help anybody who failed to believe and follow the strict commandments. Death for them was an eternity of agony. But god loved them.
Nowadays the churches are empty and vaccinations, sanitary conditions and medicines have banished death from every day experience, pushed it to the periphery. Death is no longer every day; it’s much more of a rarity. When we get ill we expect to be cured. When it does happen, and the unfortunate succumb to death, the process is sanitised. Undertakers are quick to whisk the body off, make it presentable and display it for as short a time as possible, in dim light with gentle background music. People do not often get to see death up close. I’m now seventy-five and I’ve only seen and touched two dead bodies. We watch boxes being carried in to sit briefly before for a short ceremony before disappearing behind curtains to be incinerated. We are informed those were our friends, colleagues and love ones inside those boxes, but we don’t see them. We are given some ashes and cherish them as if they are really the people we loved. Those ashes are probably the wooden casket!
It’s the thought that counts. We loved them. They are gone. We miss them. We demonstrate our grief by pouring it into the keeping and disposal of ash. It’s how we cope with death. It’s removed and sanitised. We try not to think about it.
Once more back to that idea.
I thought it was time to write a book about death, about my own death to be precise. I wanted it to be graphic and pull no punches. I wrote some pieces and filed them away. I carried out some research and followed up things to do with death that fascinated me. Then I put it aside and became consumed with other projects.
Ten years has passed. At the age of sixty-six death was beginning to loom on the horizon once again. More friends and relatives were developing serious illness and some died. I resurrected the notes I had made at fifty-six and over the ensuing years. My mortality was becoming more real by the day. I thought I was getting more to write about. Soon it would be me who had symptoms. I would have the material to make this a diary of my own death. When the symptoms began to appear I would write about them and try to describe how I was feeling. I am a writer. That’s what I do. In between I would write about death in the abstract. Explore death. Look objectively at death. I’d call it The Death Diaries. I started adding to what I had written.
That’s what this book is; it’s all my thoughts and feelings about death.
So I started writing and jotting thoughts down again. The juices bubbled. The ideas flowed. Then they stalled once again. I still had no symptoms. The central focus of the book was missing.
We jump forward another ten years. I’m now coming up seventy-six and things have slowly progressed. I’m ageing and suffering the usual ailments but I’m in good shape. I haven’t gone completely gaga and my body is holding up. No new major scares…. Yet!
The idea of a diary of my own death was wearing thin. I still didn’t have any symptoms yet. I did have a number of articles that I’d written concerning death but no diary. But I was still very much concerned with death. Once again I felt the need to write the book. It called to me.
The book had been largely side-lined for years. In fact, I lost it altogether. It languished on an old computer drive. Many of my writings were unrecoverable. They’d died. I retrieved part of it and started again. I began to realise that it wasn’t so much a diary as a set of thoughts regarding death. I changed the name. Instead of ‘The Death Diaries’ I called it ‘The Book of DEATH’.
These then are my thoughts regarding my death as well as death in general. I hope you enjoy them as much as I’m enjoying writing them down. They might be a little muddled up in terms of when they were written. I hope that doesn’t interfere too much with the reading process and you can forgive me for that. They are the intermittent product of twenty years of thoughts, quite a lot of research along with quite a lot of my views and prejudices. Religion comes in for a lot of slagging. You’ll see. The final product is certainly not in any distinct chronological order. I didn’t think that mattered too much. Maybe it does. I’m in two minds. You decide.
You may find parts upsetting. Some parts I think are quite humorous. Some are light and some are deeper. No doubt they will get a little darker as I go along. As Leonard Cohen said ‘You want it darker? We kill the flame.’
For now I’m seventy-five, the flame might be flickering a little but it’s still burning.
‘And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.’ (Thank you John Lennon and Paul McCartney). I leave you with that nice thought.
No I don’t – ‘Here’s to Death!’
Opher 21.3.2025
The Book of DEATH: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Ophe Opher, Goodwin, Opher: 9798294533908: Books