I suppose I must have been hearing Paul Robeson singing Olâ Man River from the moment I was born, if not before. My father was a Light Programme man and that almost impossibly deep voice was a regular feature on the likes of the BBCâs Family Favourites. But I canât pin down when I first started paying attention to the words.
They were truly miserable, even though written in that patronisingly phoney cotton pickersâ idiom that the very white librettist, Oscar Hammerstein, chose to deploy. This parody of slave speech would be decried as a racial insult if anyone other than a rapper used it today, but in those days we just took it as authentic.
But the power of the sentiment shone through, partly through Robesonâs heartfelt delivery. I was a young member of a comfortably-positioned lower middle class English family back then but the pain of those words somehow penetrated my consciousness as profoundly sincere. I particularly remember the final verse:
âAh gits weary
An' sick of tryin';
Ah'm tired of livin'
An' skeered of dyin'â
I tried to imagine how a man could be so burdened by life as to feel such despair. At that time, though my parents were standard Church of England Christians, meaning that they hardly ever attended church and only rarely spoke of beliefs, I was expected to attend Sunday school every week and proudly introduced to the church choir by my mother and it was through this that I made some kind of a link between Robesonâs broken man and what I was told to dwell upon as Jesusâs suffering so that I could be saved from sin: âMy God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?â But I was very young and the idea of dying, or being dead, was beyond me to contemplate. It wasnât that I thought I would live forever. It was that my imagination wasnât up to thinking about my own non-existence.
I think that started to change when, first, President Kennedy was gunned down and it dawned on me that I was supposed to accept that all those cowboy villains did actually die and then, not long after, my Nan died. But even then, it was too remote to feed back into my assumptions about my own life. What really shifted things for me was when I learned a few years later that my grandfather, Nanâs husband, had died of TB when my Dad was only 16. By then I must have reached my teens and, somewhere in my head, I developed this utter, but unfounded, conviction that my father would also die when I became 16.
At that time, I was still clinging on to the notion that there was âsomeone up thereâ looking after us in an all-powerful way and I started to pray earnestly each night that it would not happen. I remember it reaching such a pitch that my standard plea became, âTake me instead, God. Donât let Dad die.â
I will say now, and you must forgive me my honesty or not, that I donât know where this came from. I loved my Dad, as a son should, but for it to reach the level where somehow I saw it as down to me to save my Dadâs life by offering my own to a figure I had no evidence for is something that baffles me even now. I think it may just have been teenage dramatics. But I think in some way it fed what became my belief that my family were under my protection, as if I was some kind of celestial sheepdog and they were my flock. Is that narcissism or egomania or something? But out of it came the depression that haunted the rest of my life as it dawned on me that no matter how hard I tried I could never measure up to the task.
Something else came of it too. Two things actually. Firstly, my belief in that interventionist old man in the skies started to falter. And secondly, I started to recognise my own mortality. It is that second thing that I want to focus on here.
For most of my life after that, the inevitability of my death did not worry me. âThe one certainty is that we are all going to dieâ became just a part of living. It became just something I trotted out in company to give the impression that I was clever and rational and, I suppose, brave.
But there was a period when, inside my head, I realised that it was more complicated than that. That was when my marriage broke down and took me with it and, for the first time in my life, I contemplated suicide. Night after night, after work, I stood at the edge of the Central Line platform and actively considered throwing myself in front of the next train (a selfish thought, I know, and knew even then, but, again, I am trying to be honest here). What is interesting looked back on from here but was then hugely, decisively, powerful was that I realised that I couldnât actually see it through.
I found rationalisations, of course I did. I had heard and read of the misery inflicted on the poor train drivers who become the unwilling accomplices to such actions and told myself it would be wrong to be the person who, for his own narrow purposes, caused them such avoidable pain. But mostly I survived by bringing to mind my two children and thinking how bad it would be for them.
But behind all this rationalising there was another force lurking, hoping not to be identified, and that was my own will to live. Gradually I realised that, however much despair I was feeling, it was not enough to outweigh the drive to survive. I wasnât âafraid to dieâ as such but if I came anywhere close to dying my brain and body would fight to live on and I couldnât stop them.
Again, a link formed in my thinking. My mother had died just ten years before and I had had to watch her. It had taken five years for the cancer to eat her up and because of her indomitable will, something over which she had no control, she could not die until it killed her. And somehow, I came to see that I too could not bring about my own end. I told myself that it wasnât a matter of cowardice but genuinely a deep-seated instinct to stay alive. It became confirmed in the years that followed as one after another situation arose in which my survival was more or less in jeopardy (bombing campaigns, trees falling in storms, near accidents on the road, and a new and growing fear of heights) and each time I felt not the prospect of eternal peace but the dread of extinction. My mantra changed from âeverybody has to dieâ to âIâm not afraid of death, only of dyingâ.
But then I was still only in my fifties and, as I now realise, I was still able to consider the inevitability of my own death because it was too remote to have any tangible meaning. Barring an external intervention or some systems failure inside my body I could still see the road of my life stretching out ahead to a distance beyond my capacity to focus.
But I am now seventy-four, going on seventy-five and when I wake in the dead of night it is different. Let me try to explain how.
For the past couple of years, I have woken to hear myself express the desire to return to sleep and not to wake in the morning. I have tried, oh, how I have tried, to challenge this dreadful prayer. At the same time, I have regular nightmares of being forced out over the edge of high buildings with the visceral sense that I am about to plunge to my death. I hear the sound of the central heating pipes cooling and imagine it is some FBI assassin come to take my life. I go down to check that the front door is double locked. And it infects my waking life too. I grow nervous of driving and even of crossing the road or travelling by train because of some indistinct fear that I will be killed. Is that paranoia or is it simply my brain trying to attach meaning to a formless dread?
I try to pacify myself with the thought that the desire to be dead is meaningless because I cannot bring it about and there is no-one outside of me who can (I long ago banished God from the realm of rational possibility). I know that the vagal nervous system could shut me down but I have no control over it. There is no switch that I could throw.
And usually, after half an hour or so of this mental masturbation I grow weary enough to return to sleep. And so far, I have woken each morning and got on with my life, more or less without regret.
But last night, the conversation took a different turn. I found myself asking why I wanted to be dead. And, slowly, the answer came that things had moved on and that what had been on the so distant horizon as to be effectively out of range was now in plain sight. I do not mean that I am mortally ill or anything of the kind, only that, where formerly the span ahead of me could be comfortably envisaged as longer than the life behind me, that situation was now irrevocably reversed. Let us suppose that I live into my nineties, that is a mere twenty years from now and twenty years is a blink of the eye. Years are flashing by and I can do nothing about it.
And in all of this, I dread more than anything a lingering decline into incapacity, whether of body or mind, which is the fate I see all around me. And so, it seemed to me, I was allowing myself the futile luxury of wishing to end all this proximate uncertainty with immediate and painless effect. It was then that I realised that I was once again tramping through that linguistic wilderness of âI am not afraid of death, only of dying.â Only now the event was close enough that the distinction was tangible: discernible.
I still could not grasp what it would mean to be dead. I am not sure any human can. The sheer finality of it is always tempered by language which â like âdead for all eternityâ, say â conjures up some level of continuing awareness of your non-being. The thought of oblivion â not of nothingness, because again even that word carries a negative value of continuance â of the simple cessation of self, of finality, causes such mental conflict as to be beyond rationalising.
And that made me wonder whether it is that thought that has afflicted and still afflicts those wise and powerful intellects of the past and present and turns them at their last from confirmed atheists into religious converts. It is such a clichĂŠ that something must be driving it. Could it be that their sense of their own significance renders them unable to contemplate the thought of a world existing without them, even in spirit, or, perhaps more tellingly, that it renders them unable to contemplate the simple thought of ânot beingâ. If you believe sufficiently in the importance of you, any sort of afterlife might seem better than none.
Right now, I disagree. I still cannot think of anything worse that being alive for all eternity. Perhaps that is why I wake up each night wishing I were dead: that it was all over for me. But for how long will I continue to think that? If I knew my appointed hour had come, how much would I wish to postpone, or maybe outlive, it?
Oscar Hammerstein had Paul Robeson sing that he was âskeered of dyinââ Perhaps that is truly the nature of the human condition. But not because we fear oblivion but because we canât handle the thought of it but are uncertain, and frightened, of what may come next.
