NewPhilosopherthink is incredibly healthy and
it is more than anything about
communication. Not about fo-
cusing on the television pro-
grams that fundamentally sen-
sationalise it, or make it scary,
because I think that’s part of
the fear factor is that there’s a
lot of fiction out there which is
not necessarily reflective of the
facts and how death is going
to arrive and what it’s going to
feel like and how long it’s go-
ing to take and how you’re go-
ing to react to it. Because until
you’re there you don’t know,
and knowing it’s OK to be-
have the way that feels right to
you I think is quite liberating.
I had a lovely young man at
one of the book signings, and I
talked about when my mother
died, was dying, my girls didn’t quite
know what we should do, so what we
did was we sang, so we sat around her
bed and we sang, and we laughed, and
we talked. She was in a coma, but our
absolute fervent belief and hope was
that she would still be able to hear. So,
we did a tremendous amount of laugh-
ing at her deathbed in the hope that if
when she did go out of this world the
last thing that she heard was laugh-
ter and love and caring – gosh, that’s
a good way to go. And a young man
came up to me at a book signing and
he said, “When my mother was dying
I carried this guilt all these years be-
cause somebody said something, and I
laughed, and I thought how awful for
me to laugh when my mother is dy-
ing.” And he said, “Now, I don’t carry
that guilt at all now having read what
you’ve written because I realised, may-
be she heard me laugh and maybe she
had taken some comfort from that.”
The other side of lifeJust being able to read about it,
just being able to hear other people’s
experiences, being able to know that
there isn’t a right and there isn’t a
wrong, takes away some of that pres-
sure that we feel that there is a way
that we have to behave or a way that
we have to feel. Just as you have so
many millions of variations of the hu-
man being, so we have so many mil-
lions of variations of how we should
approach death, and it’s not about
compartmentalising it, and it’s not
about mechanising it, it’s not about
medicalising it, it’s about allowing it to
be whatever you feel is right for you. I
think we’ve got more freedom in that
now than we’ve ever had in the past.A lot of the fear of death comes down
to the ultimate ‘fear of missing out’, in
that you’re not going to be around to
experience anything that’s going to
transpire when you’re gone, but I alsothink that there’s this fear of not
having accomplished enough
over the course of one’s life, that
we’re going to arrive at the end
having not taken enough risks,
not having laughed enough, not
having accomplished our goals.
Is there a different way of look-
ing at death so that we look at
what we have had, rather than
looking at it as a terrible thing
that will happen at the end of
our lives?
It isn’t actually about death
and dying, it’s about living.
Our focus needs to be on liv-
ing. Death will come, one way
or the other, that’s the guar-
antee. It may come tomor-
row, it may come in the next
two minutes, it may come in
ten years, fifty years’ time – we
don’t know. If we make that our focus,
then what we miss is everything in
between now and then. So we should
be focusing on the fact that if death is
going to happen tonight, what would
we do differently today? And if that’s
the way in which you live, then you’re
going to have a much fuller life, so
that when death does come chances
are that you’ll have fewer regrets. It’s
a dreadful waste of time to regret
things on your deathbed. Nobody’s
going to say, I wish I’d spent more
time at work. It’s simply not going to
happen. And if that’s your regret, then
that shows you need to spend more
time with your family. So, if you know
what it is, do it now. And live, because
as my grandmother would say, you’re
a long time dead in your coffin, but
you’ve got a very, very short time on
this earth. We need to live to the ab-
solute full, knowing that death may
come tomorrow.