Philip Gould - When I Die

Alastair Campbell came in to see us on Wednesday morning. He had been on the phone to Mum living through the night with us. And so it was a bit of a shock for him to see Dad sitting up, grinning and joking away. We found it hard to describe how real and close we had been the night before.

It was surreal sitting there with him, chatting about France, football, Alastair’s boys, politics. Dad said to Alastair, ‘You know, you’ve lived your whole life wanting to live in an invisible bubble, now I’m in a real one.’ Alastair was running a quiz that night and tested out the questions on us. James, the day nurse, joined in. We could have been in our sitting room at home.

Alastair wrote in his diary after he left:

PG still with us. They had stabilised him and he said I should go in later. He was in bed ten on the intensive care unit. Gail and the girls there. A nice nurse called James who was a big Norwich fan. PG had his head inside a plastic bubble which was helping him to breathe. He had tubes galore into one hand and arm. Yet he was so much better than I had expected. Chatty, funny, and apart from when he moved, and lost his breath, generally ok. I said never do that to me again. What? Make me feel you’re dead when you’re not. But when the girls went to get a cup of tea, he said he was still looking at days not weeks. I stayed for an hour or so and it was at times almost as though he wasn’t really dying. Like any other chat. But not for the first time when I left I wondered if it was the last time I would see him. I did a bit of work when I got home, blogged again on Greece, did a bit of a bike session but I was feeling very down and anxious about him. I had to go out later and host the Portland pub quiz which was fine. Lifted me out of the gloom but I was straight back in on the way home.

After he left we all sat round chatting, laughing and planning. We had never been closer than we were that day. Dad kept saying, ‘We have a great family, all here together.’ He would look around at us all, grinning. He loved it when we were all up, when we were close.

And Mum was at the heart of this. I always knew she was strong – as Dad used to say, she was a force of nature. But somehow she rose to that moment. She had endless love and comfort for Grace and me and she was Dad’s pillar of strength. As his body slowly started to fail she became his extra limbs. He was never really calm unless she was in the room. He looked to her for help with the doctors, trusted her to be his voice when he did not have one. It was like the strength of her love suddenly gave her this extra power, it was extraordinary. And at the same time she let herself lean on Grace and me more than she ever had done before. We just became a total team.

Dad seemed to me to be working on two planes. On the deeper internal one, he was coming to terms with the new situation. But, more immediately, he was also dealing with the limits of his body and a mind slightly befuddled by drugs. He was often a little high and some of his lines kept us in hysterics. At one point on Wednesday he looked over and said, ‘Look, there’s the new unit over there – the three Gs. My little Gracie, the fighter, is the left back, Georgia is Bobby Moore, the heart and soul of the team, and Mum is Alex Ferguson.’

During the afternoon Grace and I popped out to give my parents some time together. We had some sushi, feeling very strange and exposed outside the hospital. We bought Dad a little lion and a card saying ‘Daddy of all Daddies’, writing one line each. We found him a Dictaphone, to add to the pile of possessions he never used.

I remember announcing in the evening that this was the happiest day of my life and my family all looked at me like I had lost the plot. But it was true.

We had returned from that point of absolute haunting fear. Dad had been saying for a while how when you are given a definite deadline, time loses its meaning. When you are not planning for tomorrow, time becomes circular and all you have is the moment. So the moment goes on for ever.

When he said it I remember thinking: time does not stand still for the rest of us, Dad – we have to imagine a future without you. I thought about the election campaigns he would miss, the boyfriends he would never meet, the children he would not know. But somehow that moment on Tuesday night, when we all faced death together, had changed everything.

Those last few days were the longest of my life. Every conversation, every smile took on a new significance. I felt the most pain and the most joy I have ever felt. And sitting there on Wednesday I felt so incredibly lucky to have those few days, and I knew Dad did too. He looked at the time he had left, recalculated, and thought, yeah, that is just enough. Just enough time to say goodbye, to finish my book, to get things right.

He was a strategist; he wanted to have some control over his destiny, to choose his death. He drank in knowledge about his condition. He had no interest in being distracted from what was happening or hiding in escapism. He was constantly aware, asking questions, analysing and re-analysing his situation. And in his final days he watched his numbers constantly, as if his charts were an exit poll – what are my numbers today?

There is no doubt that he did not want to die. That he had so much more he wanted to give, to do. He loved life so fully and deeply. When I chose the poem I would read at his funeral, ‘Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die’ (‘A Song of Living’ by Amelia Josephine Burr), it summed him up for me.

This was not the peaceful end of someone who thought they had given everything they had to give. He appreciated the intensity of the Death Zone, as he called it, because he was someone who loved life. He found a way to reconcile the two, empowering himself in facing death by making the life he had left count.

He looked at us and said:

‘Girls, four days left to try and change the world. You can do a lot in four days.’

The three of us left that night together at about eleven after he had fallen asleep, exhausted but a lot happier. The house felt very empty and we all floated about a bit, struggling to sleep.

Thursday, 3 November

On Thursday, Grace and Mum got to the hospital very early. Grace had to leave in a couple of hours for a work shift and Dad had visits from Matthew Freud and Professor Cunningham. By the time I came in mid-morning, Mum was sitting working away on her BlackBerry and Dad was resting, exhausted from a busy morning. Mum never stopped working, finding an hour here and there when Dad was sleeping, still on top of things even when her life was falling apart around her.

Dad had a long conversation with Matthew and I knew that meant a lot to him. Dad loved Matthew like he was family.

Mum told me Dad had been telling Professor Cunningham that he knew he was approaching death because of the dreams he had started to have. They were intense, extraordinary dreams like nothing he had ever experienced. He would be overwhelmed by the richness of what he saw – a beautiful city, just out of reach, made up of a kaleidoscope of colours, paintings, tapestries and buildings. This would be interspersed with periods of blackness. Somehow he felt death was calling him.

I came in with an article I had written for our local paper and Dad immediately perked up. He was always our biggest fan, so proud of our achievements, dismissing our failures as learning experiences. He spent about forty minutes carefully struggling through the article. By then his breathing was declining even with the machine’s support and we were trying to stop him speaking so much. But he kept telling anyone who came in, this is my daughter, this is her article.

I left the room so the nurses could help him off the bed on to the chair. When I came back in he was very proud of himself, told me he had made a funny joke. As he had got up, wearing his bubble helmet, he said: ‘One small step for man.’ He kept laughing at his spaceman analogy. He spent so much of his last few days smiling and laughing, his happiness lifting all of us. He was in so much pain and discomfort but somehow his spirit took him beyond that.