A Reflection on Death

Philip Seymour Hoffman RIP

 

I must confess that I couldn’t have named Philip Seymour Hoffman before his sad death earlier this week, though I knew the face and voice.

It took his death to make me put the name to two life-enhancing cinema performances I hugely enjoyed – once as a moustachioed, paunchy, profane explosive CIA agent in ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’(one particular scene will make most people who watch it want to applaud, though it’s interesting to wonder if it might not have been better without all the f-words), and once as a musician in ‘A Late Quartet’, one of the best films of the last few years. So I was moved by his death, as one is when some total strangers, especially actors or public figures, die (and even more so when they are much younger than I am).

That voice will not be heard again. Those films now contain shadows of a person who has gone from us, and they become more haunting and more distant as they recede into the past. The civilised person tries to think, in all such circumstances, of the majesty and seriousness of death, and of the bereaved, especially – in this case - the children. It never occurred to me for a second that it was a matter for political comment or propaganda.

 

The older I get, and the more death I experience directly, the more I try to stick to the rule that one does not speak ill of the dead. I’m not sure it applies when undoubted monsters die, but otherwise I can see the point of it. If you wouldn’t have said it while they were alive, when they could answer back, you shouldn’t take advantage of death to say it when they can’t respond and when their families and friends are full of grief. And in any case, my view is that they have gone before an all-knowing justice which (to put it mildly) needs no help from me, and which I both fear and hope that I shall sooner or later face myself.

 

No doubt I’ve broken this rule in the past. I regret having done so. I will try not to break it again.

 

Then, I began to notice stirrings among the Twitter mob. His death, it was suggested, was in some way a refutation of my views about ‘addiction’. Then, today, one person wondered in public whether I had responded to Mr Seymour Hoffman’s death by saying or thinking that it served him right. That made me decide to write this.

 

Well, these are the sorts of critics and opponents I have acquired, by refusing to take a fashionable position on drugs. I don‘t mind all that much. It’s not me they harm by harbouring this idea of me. It’s themselves, by reducing their opponents to ludicrous caricatures and so preventing themselves from thinking about what others say.

 

I don’t wish to use this occasion to have another argument about ‘addiction’, and ask readers not to post comments on that subject. But I would like to say something about death and the proper response to it.

 

Was it the 20th century of war and bombing, mass graves and mass murder, that made us forget the simple, overwhelming rules of our civilisation? Remember Wilfred Owen’s reference to each slow dusk being the poor equivalent in war to the ‘drawing down of blinds’ in the street,  which would have marked any individual death before 1914, not to mention the panoply of mourning dress, black-bordered paper, wreaths and formal grief, now so vanished that a funeral can pass down a busy street and most people will not even turn to look, let alone bow their heads. Death is serious, the most serious thing we face. It is by thinking about it, and recognising that it is real and actually happens, and that it will really happen to us, that we become adults.

 

At the entrance to one of the Wren churches in the City of London there is a great black stone grave slab inscribed with the words ‘Prepare to Follow’ in deeply incised letters. No-one, seeing this, can pretend that it does not apply to him or her. Follow we must and shall, whether we want to or not.

For me this dark doorway is most unbearable if it leads nowhere. That is why the most fitting statements about it have been written by believers. I advise anyone, believer or not, to recall and commit to memory John Donne’s great, meditation ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee’, also the Requiem Aeternam, ‘Rest eternal grant unto him, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon him’, and finally this extract from the astonishing words of the English burial service, the only ceremony, in my view,  which fully matches the raw power of the occasion with its immense depth and beauty of language and great thoughtfulness : ‘ Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life; through our Lord Jesus Christ who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself’. If anyone feels like commenting on this, I’d ask them to do so in a civil and restrained manner. It should not be the opportunity for another argument about drugs.