Philip Gould - When I Die

And my life gained a kind of intensity that it had never had before. It gained a quality and a power that it had never had before.

I have my wife and my children here for me at this moment, because I am defining myself now through death, I’m giving meaning to myself through death. Without that I do not know what I would do. I need family and I need meaning and they converge into the same thing in the end. I do not see how I could get through this without the support of my family. It would be absolutely impossible to do that. I cannot envisage how anyone could do that.

I rely upon my family enormously, almost completely. I try to lead them. I try to inspire them. I try to show strength. It is me who is dying but me who has to show them a way forward.

I do not suppose there are many people in the world who know they have fewer than three months to live, who are trying to articulate what it feels like as I am doing now. I do not mean to suggest that only I am articulate enough to say these things, but that this is a unique opportunity for me.

I want to write and talk about dying. It is important for me to do that. It is an extraordinary experience to know you just have these few months, or weeks, or days and to be able to articulate your feelings about that.

I want to say something else as well, because this is not a seminar. In six weeks or less, I will be dead. Before then, I will face huge fear. This is the real, unavoidable experience that is coming unstoppably my way.

The moment you accept the imminence of death, fear disappears – up to a point. The other night, my blood levels had fallen, which is bad. And in general, my tests were not as good as I would have liked, and I felt fear. I felt the future rushing towards me. Time was running out. Maybe soon I would be in a hospice, and once I went there I might not escape.

I could feel it happening and it is inevitable that you feel fear. You can conquer it, but you cannot, in all honesty, obliterate it, and it is wrong even to suggest that you can. Fear is still there.

Now what I say every time is, go to the fear, seek it out. Be like a fear-seeking missile. It works, not always but most of the time. Certainly, looking at fear this way is essential. The moment you move towards fear, the closer you move towards the avoidance of fear, the conquering of fear, and the better it is.

This strategy is paradoxical of course. Obviously it is better to have less fear rather than more, but we are in one big paradox here. It is death that gives intensity to life. All of us know this, all of us living in the Death Zone. I talk to people like myself about this all the time: only through death and the fear of death do you feel this intensity.

That is the key to it. Intensity comes from knowing you will die and knowing you are dying. This is particularly true when you are given the death sentence, as I was. Suddenly you can go for a walk in the park and have a moment of ecstasy. I go to the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park opposite our house. I go to the exhibition tent and I sit there and have a coffee and I feel ecstasy after ecstasy after ecstasy. This is built upon this feeling of certainty, of knowledge, of death. There is ecstasy because I am not dead yet.

I mentioned earlier that I had a terrible night recently. It could not really have been much rougher; I was very, very tired and was sick for most of the night. I had to make maybe a dozen trips to the loo and was feeling generally just dreadful. Gail stayed with me as I struggled.

In the morning she came in to see me and by this time I did not look good. Gail just gave me this smile of tenderness that was almost beyond words it was so wonderful. The tenderness she showed me was beyond anything I could ever have expected. It was extraordinary. I felt security. I felt, finally, I am safe at home.

I knew then that the tenderness I saw on her face was utterly dependent upon the knowledge that I was going to die, and that I would soon be dead. Without that knowledge of death there would have been no such tenderness, but with it, such tenderness was possible. Death is immensely cruel but also immensely powerful.

I am enjoying my death. There is no question I am having the most fulfilling time of my life. I am having in many ways the most enjoyable time of my life. I am having these moments of ecstasy. I am having the closest relationships with all of my family. This is the most intense time of my life.

Why should all enjoyment stop the moment someone tells you that you are going to die? Of course it does not stop. Death has many components. You do feel sadness. I am leaving my children and my wife. Georgia has said to me: ‘Dad, I want you to be there when I get married, when I first have a child.’ Grace has said similar things.

What I want to say to my daughters is that this is the most exciting and extraordinary journey of my life. My only regret is that it will end, and end soon. I would like to be on this journey with you for ever and a day. I want to be with you all the time. I know that it is not possible, but I wish profoundly that it was. Your own journeys lie ahead of you and you will take what I have started and turn it into something much more magnificent, much more extraordinary.

Death can leave you feeling incomplete and it is sad. But it is also the process of transformation and change and excitement. It is beyond my moral or philosophical understanding to say which sides of this experience are most important. I just do not know.

But I do know this. 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.

So there are moments of intense enjoyment. The great balance in the Death Zone rests between the pain and the gain. Without doubt, for me the gain has been greater than the pain.

The opportunity, the possibility, the chance of fulfilment makes this the most extraordinary and important time of your life. Can you enjoy it? Yes, you can. Should you enjoy it? Well, if you can, yes!

I feel well equipped for this last stage largely because of the help I have been given. Death sounds so frightening, but so did cancer. So did chemotherapy. So did surgery. All these things are frightening and all of these things are tough.

But at the end we have it within ourselves to cope with them.

I was absolutely sure when I was diagnosed with cancer that I wanted – I took an instinctive decision – to share this experience with the world, and I thought I had to do it. I was absolutely determined to communicate in some way to the world what had happened, and I wanted to do it and I did it.

There is a misconception in the way that death is projected and communicated. I would not say that black becomes white or white becomes black but there is definitely a misconception.

Changing that is my purpose now. I am attempting to transform perceptions of death rather as I tried to transform perceptions of politics. I want to lead people to understand that what they are told about death is not necessarily the reality.

Life is a dialectical process. It is not linear. One moves forward dialectically. You follow a path, learn from that, and you change. You take another path. Learn from that. And so on.

I worked in advertising, which I loved. I then did politics, which I absolutely loved. After many more changes I entered the world of cancer, which is a very powerful world and one that I hope I have helped people understand better with my writing about it. Now I have entered the world of death: the Death Zone. And my impression is that people want to know about that too.

Now, am I going too far? Have I crossed barriers? I think that probably I might have done. I have not been as sensitive as I should to the needs of Gail, Georgia and Grace, let alone those of my wider family. I was determined to press ahead, to do this.