Jeremy Clarke: Laughing in the face of death – a story of the final years

But you look so well!” How many times have I heard that lately. Kindly meant by most, but for a few, it’s outrageous, after all, they have heard or read about my health, and they feel cheated of the mushrooms growing out of the side of my head that they’d been hoping for. Either way, I’m surprised by the compliment. Yes, the tan and this expensive shaving balm Catriona bought me, and now hair again, make me appear unravaged from the neck up.

“But you should see the rest of it,” I laugh gaily, detailing the bulge in my neck where the chemotherapy tube remains in place; the young Brigitte Bardot breasts; the scarred, punctured jelly belly; the spindle shanks; the lizard-skin calves; the knobbly feet; the black toenails oozing some sort of clear liquid that I don’t enquire about.

“But you do look fabulous,” they insist. And vanity whispers: “Perhaps it’s true!” Maybe some sort of psychic flaring is making me attractive to those with an eye for that sort of thing.

“You must keep thinking positively,” say others, grasping my hand and looking me in the eye. “Mind, body, spirit – eh? Mind over matter – eh? Come on. You can do it.” I might be encouraged by one of those anecdotes about a chap who was absolutely riddled. Half man, half derelict termite mound.

But stubborn. Never-say-die, life-and-soul sort of a bloke. Was given six months to live 10 years ago, went to live in Phuket, opened a ladyboy bar, still going strong, doctors baffled.

Or there are the “Well, we’ve all got to go some time” merchants. These are usually middle-aged, comfortably off, high–testosterone sporty men exuding health and strength from every pore. They probably secretly think that they are the blessed exceptions who will live forever, riding the crest of a pharmacological wave of one incredible scientific breakthrough after another.

“Yes, yes. Undeniably true,” I say. “The year I was born, life expectancy for a UK male was exactly my age now, 65. So I have no complaints and only gratitude to have been allotted my full share.” 

Some of these stoics might go as far as to say they rather envy me the advance warning, and therefore the time and space to relax and compose myself, to read the poets, make my peace, look at the sky and so forth. How elegant, they feel, to slope off in my prime and be ever afterwards remembered like that on their phones.

“Oh, I couldn’t agree more,” I say. “I feel very fortunate indeed to be spared a toothless old age.

“Look at it this way,” advise other comforters. “We come from nothing and go back to nothing. There’s no such thing as ‘the dead’ – see? “The Glorious Dead”? Rubbish. You’re either alive or you’re nothing. This is just the blink of an eye, mate. A bird flitting through an Anglo-Saxon feasting house. In one door and out the other. Ever heard that one? Bloody marvellous. Life ain’t normal. Being nothing is normal, my son, so you’d better get used to the idea.”

“Why, thank you very much,” I say. “I hadn’t thought of it quite like that. Throws a quite different light on the whole business.”

And the last time I saw Professor Brian Cox, I think he said that the latest theory of life deriving from the study of black holes is that we humans are all basically holograms, comprised of bytes of information, and it is therefore possible that when we die these bytes of information will disperse into the universe, perhaps to reform elsewhere. Mind you, we’d drunk a lot of champagne by the time we got on to black holes and holograms, and I might have got that completely wrong or imagined or dreamed it.

And then there is my Aunty Margaret, the same age as Her Majesty the Queen, who wrote me a letter last year telling me I must “get right with the Lord” as a matter of the gravest urgency. The suggestion being, I think, without having to put it into stark words, that I was going straight to hell on a poker unless I repented of my sin and reformed my reprobate heart and walked in the light in the short time I had left on Earth. 

My Aunty Margaret is an unfailingly kind, humble and faithful Christian and her letter shook me rather. She finished by saying that she had been moved to write me such a letter by a spirit of Christian love rather than chastisement. I believe her and love her for it. And if I’m honest I would say that of all the advice I’ve received so far on this controversial subject, my Aunty Margaret’s letter is well out in front.

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Feeling lucky always, I assumed that chemotherapy would be the piece of cake that some had predicted for me. They said they knew people who were treated with chemotherapy for years and years and meanwhile managed to live a relatively normal life. But by only the fourth cycle of my second round of it, I realised that this wasn’t going to happen in my case. I felt so rotten that it seemed to me that death would have been easier to bear and was probably preferable.

Of course, I told myself to get a grip, to put on my metaphorical tin hat and sit it out. No doubt the feeling of being poisoned by novichok or similar would pass eventually. I also reminded myself that chemotherapy was in fact part of my medical treatment, a cure, and that I had a lot to be thankful for. I was warm. I was comfortable.

Catriona was up and down the stairs like a sprite with trays, mugs, kisses and good cheer. I had books to read, also delivered from the letterbox to my lap by the hand of Catriona. Thick-paged hardbacks, a hundred years old, some of them. All I had to do was lie and read and be patient and pleasant while the church and state village bells struck off the passing hours.

Unfortunately this time chemotherapy affected my mind as well as my body. Result – self-absorption of the crudest sort. Despair. Paranoia. Even rage. No longer the cheerful, doughty, modest, philosophical old sort I’d been aiming to be when the going became soft to heavy in places, but a silly old bastard. And this is the creeping tragedy of dying slowly (or quickly) from cancer.

No matter how tough you are at the beginning, or impervious to pain, or courageous, or how stiff your upper lip, these qualities are not imperishable. They get used up over time. “Oh, he was a battler,” you hear said of some poor sod come the end, as though his levels of determination and fearlessness and stamina had remained constant from start to finish.

But one is not in a fair fight. Cancer’s leisurely undermining and hollowing out of a person is like the old Chinese execution method of death by a thousand cuts. Far from getting used to the pain, the more you are subjected to it, the more it saps you. The more it saps you, the greater the fear of it coming again and the more it hurts when it does come. Which is all most unfair. It is as unfair as the law of nature that says the agony of the devoured is always greater than the pleasure of the devouring.

About the time of the nadir of my rottenness, Michael came round in the evening for a drink and a natter with Catriona. Since his beloved wife Joy died three years back, Michael can be lonely.

However as a neighbour and an all-round good egg, he has an open invitation to come up the path for a drink whenever he likes. The understanding, when he’s here, is that I might totter down in my pyjamas to say hallo if I feel up to it; if I don’t, I don’t – and that’s fine.

My mental state was pretty bad. Paranoia. Catriona was plotting behind the arras, treacherously telling everybody that I wasn’t doing enough to help myself by at least engaging in some light exercise. Utter nonsense, but to me very real. I put the accusation to her. She was dumbfounded. Then she was nettled. Then she burst into tears. That was during the afternoon.

Now it was seven in the evening and she and Michael were two-thirds of the way down their first bottle of wine and the deranged beast in the attic could hear them laughing pleasantly together down below. He decided he would descend the creaking wooden stairs and join them for perhaps half an hour, just to be sociable, his scaly tail concealed beneath his new Ralph Lauren flannel pyjamas.

I refused wine. I’ve developed an aversion to it, I explained. Michael was horrified. Surely alcohol was the answer. He suggested I try beer. I said with bitterness that I would happily smoke heroin if I thought it would help. “What about cannabis?” he said. “Poleaxes me,” I said. “That’s probably because you put too much in the joint,” he said. Michael is an old hippy and knows whereof he speaks. “Look, let me show you,” he said.

He cut off a piece of oily hash no bigger than a grain of rice and made a single skinner with it, lit it, and we passed it between us. Talk about a shape-changer! My paranoia dissipated instantly and a new, cheerier perspective asserted itself. I offered my most heartfelt apology to Catriona. She put on some music – Bob Dylan’s wonderful latest – to welcome me back.

Yes, nature is unfair, but it offers some excellent remedies and compensations.

Low Life: The Spectator Columns ‘The Final Years’ is published by Quartet (£21.99) available now