Since the demise of Socrates in 399 BC, killed by the hemlock he was forced to drink on sentence from the state for corrupting the minds of Athenian teenagers, the Good Death has been deemed possible. According to Plato, his pupil, Socrates died with his senses intact, surrounded by those he loved and who loved him, and in control until the last moment, his body numbed but not distorted by that toxic drug. It’s a myth, of course. We know, as must Plato have known, that hemlock produces dreadful cramps, vomiting, convulsions; it would not have been possible for Socrates to remain calm, thoughtful, prescient while in such agony. But he wanted his death, his passage out of life, to be seen as a very public spectacle of control, of a man in charge of his destiny until the end, untroubled by pain or the terror of infinite obliteration.
In A Good Death, this week’s late-night essay on Radio Three (Monday to Friday), academics, writers and Rabbi Julia Neuberger each gave us a short meditation on what that phrase ‘to die well’ means to them. No mention was made of the most public death of recent times. Radio Three’s timing of this sequence of talks was, it seems, pure happenstance.
There was nothing gentle about this good night. Without fanfare or stagey performance, we heard reflections on that most bleak and painful truth; Socrates, and his followers, were indulging in wishful thinking. When, centuries later, Seneca tried to replicate Socrates’ passage out of life, he failed miserably.
A scholar of the classics, Professor Mary Beard is well versed in the idea of the Good Death as created by the pagan philosophers of the ancient world. She took us through the academic history before taking a shocking change of direction to tell us the story of her mother’s death. Alone in her flat, at dead of night, bleeding to death from a terrible haemorrhage caused by cancer, she rang for the ambulance. While she waited for it to arrive, she carefully wrote one last note — for the milkman. Calmly, she folded the paper, placed it in a milk bottle, and left it outside the door into her flat: ‘No milk today. We’ll let you know when to start deliveries again.’
The professor spoke in such a deadpan voice that her words really hit home. It was one of those startling moments that can only come from the intimacy of listening to a single voice on radio. No distracting imagery, no undercurrent of music, just pure transmission of thought. We heard the professor, we envisaged her mother, in certain pain and probable terror, and yet still determined to stay in control of the domestic chores.
At the end of the week, Thomas Lynch, the American writer, gave us his idiosyncratic take on death. His father was an undertaker, and Lynch himself now runs the family business in Michigan, alongside his career as a poet. His wryly elegiac memento mori took us back to that moment when, as a student of literature at university, he realised while studying Yeats and Roy Orbison that some poems have a chance of outliving their makers. The other business of his life, though, tells him, ‘We get our dose of days’, and there’s no knowing when that dose has been used up. ‘We’re born,’ he reminded us, ‘with our last breath in us.’
Not much comfort in that, and yet his ‘essay’ was strangely reassuring. Lynch’s wonderfully lilting voice spoke of bleak realities but with such lightness of touch. His poet friend is worried that his blood pressure is rising, ‘I prescribe a dose of Robert Frost…high pressure is better than none.’
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