It’s odd, but we mostly go about as if death were optional, something we could get out of, like games at school. Philip Gould, in When I Die, admits that he never gave it much thought. Then he got oesophageal cancer. He had a horrible operation, got a bit better. Then the cancer came back. He had chemotherapy, more surgery, a lot of pain. And it came back again: ‘I knew then that the game was up.’
Having worked as Tony Blair’s strategist, Gould at first imagined his illness as another kind of campaign. But once his death became certain, he underwent a remarkable change:
The unvarnished certainty that you are going to die within a certain period of time is an immensely powerful thing. It provides an opportunity for fulfilment and the experience of extraordinary depths of feeling and the chance of reconciliation . . . Death is not frightening if you accept it.
For a man whose career — whose life, by all accounts — had been dedicated to fighting, to winning, such acceptance was a revelation. Politics didn’t seem important any more. The natural world became radiant, love the only essential:
I have had more moments of happiness in the last five months than in the last five years. I have had more moments of private ecstasy than for a very long time. I feel at peace with the world.
His final days, hours and minutes are described in his own words, as well as those of his widow and children.
That Gould should have conceived of writing such a book at all, and that he did so with such honesty, shows a profound generosity. He faced death with tremendous courage, and the moment of his dying was clearly beautiful. This is what Walt Whitman meant when he wrote, in ‘Leaves of Grass’, that ‘to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier’. It would be impossible not to find the closing part of this book very, very moving.
And yet. Something made me uneasy, too. Was it Tony Blair’s words to Gould, at the time of the cancer’s recurrence? Blair said: ‘The cancer has not finished with you . . . You may have changed, but not enough; now you have to go on to a higher spiritual level.’ I thought of our former prime minister — at roughly the same time as he was issuing this wisdom — sweeping in and out of the Chilcot Inquiry, never stopping to meet the eyes of the parents of dead service personnel gathered outside, let alone exchange a word with them. Was this someone in any position to offer spiritual advice?
And if Gould felt that death brought a profound need for transformation, what did that mean? Did his life before then still hold value, purpose, meaning? Or was it in fact a tragically empty life, redeemed only by the enlightenment of its end? Did he, then, waste his life? By extension, are we wasting ours, by being too much concerned with worldly things?
So, this is not an easy read. It would be a very much less valuable book if it was. The early part, describing the illness and its treatment, is harrowing and frightening and the end is sad, as well as edifying. It will come as a revelation to the politerati who approach it with expectations based on prior knowledge of Gould’s work. Nothing could be further from the world of spin and focus-group politics of which he was an architect.
Anyone curious as to how to achieve some of Gould’s serenity — short of actually dying themselves — may like to invest in a copy of the exemplary No Death, No Fear by the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hannh, which tells you how it’s done.
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