At Your Side

Death walks beside us throughout our lives. We don’t notice nor pay much heed to this constant dark companion. After a dangerous scrape or a serious illness, we breathe a deep sigh of relief and go on. ‘There but for the grace of God’, we say. When someone close to us dies, we grieve and ponder on our own lives. But, after this hesitation, we carry on. ‘What choice do we have?’ we say.

Rex’s death remains deeply shocking to us. It has been the closest and most painful of a recent series of reminders of our mortality. Nothing can bring him back from his terrible death. And there is no antidote to grief. It has to be lived through. Yet, a shock to the system also gives us something else. The opportunity to not carry on in the same way. Our natural desire is to simply re-establish all of the routines that we previously had. But they don’t fit anymore, our normality feels empty and fractured, someone (and something) important is missing.

I have had such reminders before. My first wife died in an accident thirty one years ago, several weeks after we moved in to our first house together. I contracted cancer seven years ago and was given a very poor prognosis. Looking back, I can see that after each of these shocks my life changed significantly. At the time I didn’t see either of these events as an opportunity, just as severe threats that I had to struggle to survive. But they were both catalysts and through a very painful process, akin to the shedding of a skin or a shell, I came to see myself and my way ahead differently. And the course of my life changed.

Oddly enough, the benefits of these changes have been considerable. After Gill’s sudden death, I kept a series of promises to her. She was often reminding me to get on with my Ph.D. I’d always say, I’ll do it next weekend, let’s go away this weekend. She would give in and we would go away, often to the mountains, and next weekend rarely came. A year after she died, I did knuckle down and finish my Ph.D. Through this I came to value my intellect more highly, I then gained a new lectureship in Scotland, worked very hard and was promoted to Professor within nine years (the job at QUB that brought me here twenty years ago).

I got cancer around the time I left academia. After years of dispute and disillusion, I took early retirement to focus on my own creative work. Just a couple of months after my first collection was launched, I was brought in to Belfast City Hospital via A & E and then told the bad news. Four major operations and two recurrences later, I am almost two years clear of the disease (after being given that long to live, seven eventful years ago).

I’ve written in earlier blog posts about the changes that cancer has made in how I try and live my life. Essentially, they are: living in the here and now, living wholeheartedly, doing what matters as well as you can and not wasting time and energy on what (and who) doesn’t. Rex’s death gives a powerful reminder of their significance, for dogs do all of these things naturally.  We couldn’t wish for a better example.