Diana Athill - It's Silly To Be Frightened of Being Dead - Death and Dying - The Guardian

8/11/22, 10:46 PM Diana Athill: It’s silly to be frightened of being dead | Death and dying | The Guardian
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At theand age of 96, the legendary
can't be switched editor Diana
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Diana Athill
ways. our services. This may and product
B
Tue 23 Sep 2014 05.59 BST include personalising development
content or advertising
ack in the 1920s my mother never went to a funeral if she could help it, and was
for you.
horrified when she heard of children being exposed to such an ordeal, and my father
Are youvanished from the
happy to accept room if death was mentioned; very much later, in the 1960s, when
cookies?
the publishers
To manage in which
your cookie choices now,I including
was a partner
how to brought out aour
opt out where beautiful andon
partners rely amusing book
legitimate
aboutinterests
the trappings of death,
to use your booksellers
information, refusedmy
click on Manage tocookies.
stock something so “morbid”. I was born in
December 1917, so was fully immersed in this refusal to contemplate death. Indeed it was not
Yes,than
until more I’m happy Manage
30 years later, my cookies
when I had to visit a coroner’s office to identify a woman who had
been found dead, that I thought for the first time how extraordinary – indeed how ridiculous – it
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/23/-sp-diana-athill-its-silly-frightened-being-dead?src=longreads 1/11
was to have lived for so long without ever having seen a dead body. I have heard it suggested that
this recoil from the subject was a result of the first world war filling everyone’s minds with an
acute and appalled awareness of death, but my own explanation was, and still is, that it was a
pendulum-swing away from the preceding century’s obsession with the subject – the relish for
mourning, ranging from solemn viewing of the corpse by young and old alike, to passionate
concern about the exact degree of blackness to be worn, and for how long (for the rest of your
days if you were a widow). A mood so extreme surely had to result in a strong reaction.
It seems to me that what influences the consciousness in wartime is not death. It is killing. And
no, they are not the same thing.
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Death is the inevitable end of an individual object’s existence – I don’t say “end of life” because it
is a part of life. Everything begins, develops – if animal or vegetable, breeds – then fades away:
everything, not just humans, animals, plants, but things which seem to us eternal, such as rocks.
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Mountains wear down from jagged peaks to flatness. Even planets decay. That natural process is
death. Killing is the obscene intervention of violence, the violation which prevents a human
beingWhen
or any
weother animal from
make the reaching
For instance, wedeath
and as it Weshould be reached.
use cookies and Killing certainly
You can find did affect
out more
the minds of those
Guardian exposed
available to to partners
our the firstmay
world
storewar.similar
It shocked most of them
technologies in ourinto silence:
privacy policymany of
you who
the men online,survived
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cookies and
in it otherspoke offor
never it,the
andfollowing
I think it had and
the cookie
same policy,
effectand
on most of
those the men returned to. It was too dreadful. They shut down on it.
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M
necessary to help our and your IP address. ‘Privacy settings’ at
device
website worky maternal grandparents’ house, in which the children ofthe
properly We use this mybottom of any spent all
generation
and can't be switched information about you, Personalised ads page.
their
off, and some are holidays,
yourand where
devices andwe stayed if our empire-serving parents were abroad in
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support to the young,and
online interactions was typical of those times in that the only
content
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music-making with us to provide,
objects in it were an upright piano and a small wind-up record
measurement,
player that had belonged to my uncle when he was a boy: a condition probably unthinkable to
children today. There was no pop music
include because there were no teenagers, only children and
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grownups. Certainly once the children
content had turned 12 they began being restive (the grownups
or advertising
called it “the awkward age”) forbut
you.there was little to be done about it. There were music-hall songs
and dance music, but they could only come into a home via sheet music and if there was
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someone there who could play the piano, and the limit of adult piano-playing in our family was
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eagerness with which we children fell on Uncle Billy’s little “gramaphone”, which had been
forgotten byI’m
Yes, the grownups.Manage
happy We listened over and over again to the few records that went with it –
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some Gilbert and Sullivan songs and two or three spirituals sung by Paul Robeson. Right at the
back of the cupboard where they lived I once found another record, which turned out to be a
wartime song, a comic and rather witty version of Who Killed Cock Robin called Who Killed Bill
Kaiser. Although I was born before the war’s end, it was as remote and unreal to me as the wars of
the roses, so I was as thrilled as I would have been if I had dug up a medieval helmet, and ran to
show the record to my mother. All she said was, “That old thing – is it still there?” It was a shock
to come up so suddenly against the fact that what to me was history, to her was just something
from the day before yesterday. Absolutely no trace of that day before yesterday had been injected
into my consciousness by my elders, so whatever I was to feel about death, it had nothing to do
with war.
Mountains wear down from jagged peaks to flatness. Even planets decay. That
natural process is death
My own experience of the second world war confirmed this. Before it started, during the horrible
months when we could all feel it coming, I said to a friend: “If it does start I think I’ll kill myself.”
(Although the preceding war had been little talked about, poets and novelists had written about
it, so we were fully aware that a repetition ought to be unthinkable.) My friend replied, “Killing
yourself to avoid being killed would be a bit silly,” and I felt sadly that she was being obtuse. It
was not the prospect of being killed that was distressing me, it was having to know this obscenity
about life. And that, not fear of death, was what polluted one’s consciousness all through the
war, so that the moment it was over we too shut down on it.
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Because we did shut down. “It’s over!” That knowledge wiped out any other feeling. Although I
have never doubted
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to knows
our why)
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for the following andI had not
cookie felt and
policy, it possible
that it would ever end. In one’s twenties a year is a very long time, and there had been so many of
them.usIttoastounds me now when I hear or read peopleStore and/or access
describing the 1950s as dreary, because to
do this. Some are including page visits time by going to
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me they were to
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happy, and death was just something that would occur when I was old – and which was not, and
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Diana Athill at Oxford, just before the second world war. Photograph: Ramsey and Muspratt
That this was true, I owe to Montaigne. I can’t remember when I read, or was told, that he
considered it a good thing to spendoraadvertising
content short time every day thinking about death, thus getting
used to its inevitability andfor coming
you. to understand that something inevitable is natural and can’t
be too bad, but it was in my early teens, and it struck me as a sensible idea. Of course I didn’t set
out to think about death in a regular way every day, but I did think about it quite often, and sure
enough, it worked. Why coming to see death’s naturalness should have caused belief in an
afterlife to melt away, I am unsure, but it did. Probably that belief had been no more than an
unexamined acceptance ofManage
Yes, I’m happy
something said by a grownup: in a child’s life there are many things
my cookies
more important to question than the probability of reuniting after death with other dead people –
ideas that are tucked away on a back shelf of the mind like some object for which one has no use
ideas that are tucked away on a back shelf of the mind like some object for which one has no use
at present.
W
hen I was 16, I had my appendix removed: an operation common in those days
which seems to have gone out of fashion. Going under the anaesthetic, which
was chloroform, caused an interesting confrontation with that particular idea. As
a little girl I had occasionally suspected that there was a monster under my bed
waiting to come out and get me, scaring myself so much that I had to be calmed down and
assured that I was imagining it. Presumably the anaesthetist preparing me for the operation
diminished the flow of chloroform too soon, because I became conscious, without the least idea
of where I was or what was happening: all I knew was that I was lying on my back, on a bed, with
a stifling claw clamped down on my face. They had been lying! The monster had been there all the
time and now it had come out and got me, I was dying! The dying felt like tipping over the edge of
a cliff into black nothingness. I was hanging desperately on to the rim of the cliff. I was staring
into that black nothingness – and horror of horrors, understood that it was not nothingness: there
were shapes swimming about, things happening, creatures at large out there, and I was about to
be pitched in among all that, unprepared, ignorant, totally incapable of coping. It was terrifying –
surely one was supposed to change in some way at death, but I was still unchanged, still just my
miserably inadequate self. Into my mind there came the thought, “If I start to believe in God
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perhaps I’ll be allowed to change so that I will know what to do?” At which – and I’m still proud of
this – I answered myself: “No! That would be too shameful, just because I’m frightened.” I let go,
and down
When into the the
we make black nothingness
For instance,I we
slid.
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So, when manywe
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use later Icookies
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was not in the least alarmedand
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as your
I dimly wondered if Iinformation
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hadn’t, thewell,
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if Iofdie
anyI die.” I was
sure, off,
then,
andthat
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now in an old
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When one makes theanalyse
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ways.
of one’s home and most of one’s our services. This may and move
possessions, into such a place (or be moved, which
and product
include personalising
doesn’t apply here I am glad to say) it means that onedevelopment has reached the stage of thinking, “How am
I going to manage my increasing incompetence now that I’m so old? Who is going to look after me
for you.
when I can no longer look after myself?” Death is no longer something in the distance, but might
well be encountered any time now.
You might suppose
interests thatinformation,
to use your this wouldclick
make it moremy
on Manage alarming,
cookies. but judging from what I now see
around me, the opposite happens. Being within sight, it has become something for which one
ought toYes, I’m happy
prepare. Manage
One of the manymythings
cookiesI like about my retirement home is the sensible
practical attitude towards death that prevails here. You are asked without embarrassment
whether you would rather die here or in a hospital, whether you want to be kept alive whatever
happens, or would prefer a heart attack, for instance, to be allowed to take its course, and how
you wish your body to be disposed of. Though when a death occurs in the home it is treated with
the utmost respect, and also with a rather amazing tact in relation to us survivors, so that I doubt
if anyone has ever been disturbed by such activity as I suppose surrounds the moment of a death,
and the removal of a body: a carefulness of our peace of mind which must involve very well-
planned management.
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Diana Athill: ‘Theinbody
experience can fail inanalyse
other many ways
and that are extremely distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much
improve audience insights
stoicism, or it can switch off with little more than a flash of dizziness.’ Photograph: Sarah Lee
These matters have becomecontent discussable with one’s friends, not, of course, as a frequent part of
or advertising
gossip over lunch in the dining for you.
room (our only communal occasion) but from time to time,
perhaps when admiring someone’s stoicism if their frailty is becoming painfully apparent, or
feeling sad at someone else’s inability to accept what seems to be imminent. As a result of this
openness, I think
interests to usethat
yourmost of the click
information, people here would
on Manage consider it foolish to be frightened of being
my cookies.
dead. All of us, however, feel some degree of anxiety about the process of dying.
That process depends on what you are dying of. The body can fail in ways that are extremely
distressing slowly and painfully demanding much stoicism or it can switch off with little more
distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much stoicism, or it can switch off with little more
than a flash of dizziness. In my family we seem to have been uncommonly lucky in that respect.
There was the 82-year-old uncle who was at a meet of the Norwich Stag Hounds, enjoying a drink
with friends, when crash! And he fell off his horse, dead. There was the cousin in her eighties
who fell dead as she was filling a kettle to make tea, and the other cousin, 98, who slipped away
so gently that the sister who was holding her hand didn’t realise that she had stopped breathing.
There was my mother, a week before her 96th birthday, who had one nasty day which, to my
relief, she couldn’t remember the next morning, then slept her way out after speaking her last
words, “It was absolutely divine,” about a recent drive to a beloved place. My father, alas, had a
whole week of unhappiness after a blood-vessel in his brain had ruptured. He looked up as one
came through the door, obviously about to greet one, then when he found he couldn’t speak, his
expression became one of pain and puzzlement: he understood that something was badly amiss
but he didn’t know what it was. The moment of his dying, however, was sudden and painless. My
brother was the only person near me who clearly resented death, and that was because he had
achieved a way of life which suited him so perfectly that he wanted more. He was not frightened
of it. “No one after 80 has any right to complain about death,” he had said to me not long before.
Although it would be unwise to expect an easy dying, it is not unreasonable to

hope for one
That fortunate record makes me believe that although it would be unwise to expect an easy
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dying, it is not unreasonable to hope for one. As for after it, I feel quite strongly that I would like
my ashes to be scattered or buried in a place I love (I scattered my mother’s in her garden – and
When
the old wewho
man maketended
the For her
it for instance,
when andcouldWe
weshe nouse cookies
longer do and You
it herself can“Cor!
said find out more
That won’t
half make the flowers grow”). But such a feeling, though strong, is really absurd, because what
does it matter to the dead
cookies and similar how their bodies are
similar technologies to disposed
purposes:of? It is for the mourners
manage to do what
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A
and can't be switched information about you, page.
little while ago Iyour
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took part in a television Personalised
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programmeads about death that was designed
and content, ad
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but photographer
support online Rankin, to help himand
interactions overcome
content his fear of it, to which he bravely
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that fear is brewed in the guts, not in theaudience
mind – insights
and I remember a man I once knew
who suffered from it so badly thatpersonalising
include he told me he used to wake up in the night and have to
development
telephone his sister and begcontent
her toor come round. “What did she do?” I asked, and he said she
advertising
made tea and talked sense, for butyou.
it didn’t do much good because the thought of all those bloody
silly birds still twittering and those bastards walking up and down the street when he wasn’t
there to see them drove him mad. But even if Rankin’s programme failed to make him feel better,
whichinterests
I hope to
was
usenot
yourthe case, it was
information, clickexcellent,
on Manageand many viewers responded to it with
my cookies.
enthusiasm. I had already understood from the response to my own book, Somewhere Towards
the End,Yes,
thatI’mthe taboo on Manage
happy the subject of death, so heavy in my youth, was evaporating, and this
my cookies
was a striking example of how true this is. Even teenagers joined willingly in discussion of it.
The contributor to the programme I remember with the most pleasure is the man who said that
not existing for thousands and thousands of years before his birth had never worried him for a
moment, so why should going back into non-existence at this death cause him dismay? Everyone
laughed when he said that and so did I, and as I laughed I thought: “Dead right!”
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