Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

by Henry Marsh

Dying is rarely easy, whatever we might wish to think. Our bodies will not let us off the hook of life without a struggle. You don’t just speak a few meaningful last words to your tearful family and then breathe your last. If you don’t die violently, choking or coughing, or in a coma, you must gradually be worn away, the flesh shrivelling off your bones, your skin and eyes turning deep yellow if your liver is failing, your voice weakening, until, near the end, you haven’t even the strength to open your eyes, and you lie motionless on your death bed, the only movement your gasping breath. Gradually you become unrecognizable – at least you lose all the details that made your face characteristically your own, and the contours of your face are worn away down to the anonymous outlines of your underlying skull. You now look like the many old people, with drawn and dehydrated faces, identical in their hospital gowns, to whose bedside I would be summoned in the early hours when I worked as a junior doctor, down the long and empty hospital corridors, to certify death. Your face becomes that of Everyman, close to death, a face we all know, if only from the funeral art of Christian churches.