It’s odd, but we mostly go about as if death were optional, something we could get out of, like games at school. Philip Gould, in When I Die, admits that he never gave it much thought. Then he got oesophageal cancer. He had a horrible operation, got a bit better. Then the cancer came back. He had chemotherapy, more surgery, a lot of pain. And it came back again: ‘I knew then that the game was up.’
Having worked as Tony Blair’s strategist, Gould at first imagined his illness as another kind of campaign. But once his death became certain, he underwent a remarkable change:
The unvarnished certainty that you are going to die within a certain period of time is an immensely powerful thing. It provides an opportunity for fulfilment and the experience of extraordinary depths of feeling and the chance of reconciliation . . . Death is not frightening if you accept it.
For a man whose career — whose life, by all accounts — had been dedicated to fighting, to winning, such acceptance was a revelation.
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