It’s a strange privilege to interview people when they know they are dying. The former England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson announced in January that he had pancreatic cancer and had “at best case” a year to live. A couple of weeks ago I spoke to him, and the interview is in this weekend’s Saturday magazine.
People with terminal illnesses often seem to see the world differently from the rest of us. Perspectives and priorities change. Paradoxically, they appear to have more time for the small things in life. Take Sven. He’s still football crazy (he watched five matches the day before we chatted), but now he’s so much more conscious of everything he’d taken for granted: nature, family, simply being alive. “You appreciate everything,” he told me. “Things like friends saying in passing, ‘Are you free for a cup of coffee?’ ‘Yes, of course, come in.’ And we sit talking about old memories on the football pitch.” Somehow life’s too short to value the essential things when we don’t face an imminent threat. Just waking up every day, he said, makes him feel great. And now he’s hoping to defy his doctors’ predictions, and keep on waking up for as long as possible.
In 2011, I interviewed the former New Labour spin doctor and moderniser Philip Gould a few weeks before he died. Gould was one of the chief architects of Blairism. I asked if his cancer had changed his political position. “Oh yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s made me more leftwing is the answer. It has made me realise the importance of public service and community.”
His impending death had given him such clarity and a purity of purpose. “You know, this period of death is astonishing,” he said. “The moment you enter the death phase it is a different place. It’s more intense, more extraordinary, much more powerful.” He told me he had never felt more alive. Or more aware of where he’d gone wrong. “I was always putting politics first in a mad way, sometimes in a destructive way.”
He spent so much of his life thinking he wasn’t good enough for his wife, the publisher and senior independent director for Guardian Media Group Gail Rebuck. “It was only when I got my diagnosis that I realised how much she loved me,” he said. “For me, at the moment, going for a walk in the park with Gail is heaven.”
Probably the most famous and best interview with a dying person is the brilliant TV playwright Dennis Potter talking to Melvyn Bragg on Channel 4 in 1994 after being told he had three months left to live. Partly it’s so vivid because Potter was chain smoking throughout while sipping a cocktail of liquid morphine and champagne, but it’s most memorable because of what he said and how he said it. He told Bragg he calls his cancer Rupert after Murdoch (“I would shoot the bugger if I could.”).
For all Potter’s anger, it is his heightened sensitivity to the beauty of the world that has stayed with me most, particularly his description of the blossom on the tree in his garden as “the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be”.
Eighteen months before my mum died last year, I interviewed her for a series about ageing. She was 94 at the time, and conscious she didn’t have much time left. I said to her she seemed so much more phlegmatic about things than when she’d been younger. Yes, she said there had been so much time wasted on pointless angsting: “Every word that came out of my mouth I was thinking: is that right, is that wrong? Everything.” So what’s changed, I asked. “I no longer have to chase the anxieties away. They’ve gone.”
Sven-Göran Eriksson, Philip Gould, Dennis Potter (thanks to Bragg), Mum – I’ve learned so much from listening to them as they approach their end. They were all talking in one way or another about dying, but really they were telling us how to live.
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