Dying: A Memoir

by Cory Taylor

Which is why my drug remains unused, because of some moral qualm I share with Andrew about the harm one can inadvertently do to others, by going rogue and acting alone.

Could it be that we, whether or not we have religious beliefs, are being obstructed in our desire to die well by people who believe that God frowns on individual choice in the manner of dying? Or worse still, that God intends us to suffer? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I think they’re worth debating.

“The spirit searches for its next physical embodiment.” “Why does it do that?” “Desire.” I know enough about Buddhism to understand that desire is seen as a curse, and when the nun starts to describe the endless cycle of reincarnation that is the fate of the average soul, I can see why one might want to be rid of it.

had heard of mindfulness. A counsellor visited me in hospital after my brain surgery. She took me through a few of the basic exercises: how to breathe, how to listen to the sounds around me, how to observe my thoughts as they passed. “I use it sometimes,” I said. “It’s good,” she said, “to set aside time every day, to just enjoy the small things, the taste of an apple, the play of sunlight on the water, the smell of the rain.”

And so it goes, the endless list of pleasures I can no longer enjoy. Pointless to miss them of course, as that won’t bring them back, but so much sweetness is bound to leave a terrible void when it’s gone.

When you’re dying, even your unhappiest memories can induce a sort of fondness, as if delight is not confined to the good times, but is woven through your days like a skein of gold thread.

This fact reminded me over and over again that my circumstances were less a cause for sorrow than an opportunity to feel thankful for my unearned good fortune.

the magnetic field so strong that it imposes its own order and holds the world of the screenplay in its tense, suspenseful grip. In fiction you can sometimes be looser and less tidy, but for much of the time you are choosing what to exclude from your fictional world in order to make it hold the line against chaos. And that is what I’m doing now, in this, my final book: I am making a shape for my death, so that I, and others, can see it clearly. And I am making dying bearable for myself.

bucket list implies a lack, a store of unfulfilled desires or aspirations, a worry that you haven’t done enough with your

life. It suggests that more experience is better, whereas the opposite might equally be true. I don’t have a bucket list because it comforts me to remember the things I have done, rather than hanker after the things I haven’t done. Whatever they are, I figure they weren’t for me, and that gives me a sense of contentment, a sort of ballast as I set out on my very last trip.

No, there is nothing good about dying. It is sad beyond belief. But it is part of life, and there is no escaping it. Once you grasp that fact, good things can result. I went through most of my life believing death was something that happened to other people. In my deluded state I imagined I had unlimited time to play with, so I took a fairly leisurely approach to life and didn’t really push myself. At least that is one explanation for why it took me so long to write my first novel.

Yes, I have regrets, but as soon as you start rewriting your past you realise how your failures and mistakes are what define you. Take them away and you’re nothing. But I do wonder where I’d be now if I’d made different choices, if I’d been bolder, smarter, more sure of what I wanted and how to get it. As it was, I seemed to stumble around, making life up as I went along. Looking back, I can make some sense of it, but at the time my life was all very makeshift and provisional, more dependent on luck than on planning or intent.

we are all haunted by the life not lived, by the belief that we’ve missed out on something different and better.

The problem with reverie is that you always assume you know how the unlived life turns out. And it is always a better version of the life you’ve actually lived. The other life is more significant and more purposeful. It is impossibly free of setbacks and mishaps.

for once in my life I am free of the tyranny of choice.

that marked her out, for the rest of her life, as dangerously over-educated, full of ideas that were foreign to her family. It made them afraid of her.

That was Dad’s nightmare, the thing he feared the most. I think he would have preferred to die than end up back in the same place he had started out.

stalemate. Our default position was silence, but not of the harmonious kind. Silence for us was a form of accusation, an expression of mutual disappointment and rage, a substitute for violence.

This was a major discovery for me, that out of my hand and eye could come marks and symbols with magical properties. It meant that my consciousness could express itself to the consciousness of others and, though I didn’t fully comprehend that at the time, I did feel it in the classroom: the beginning of a quest, of a search for the miracle of mutual comprehension that I have pursued to this day. I still write so as not to feel alone in the world, but now I type. What is lost in the process is the hand-drawn aspect of the written word—some of the magic has faded, as it must do from all childhood pleasures. They begin and they end.

The discovery of my privilege was not glorious in any way, nor did it fill me with any pleasure. But it did make me see things that I might have missed before.

For what are we, if not a body taking a mind for a walk, just to see what’s there?

Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past. It is all, according to T. S. Eliot, the same thing. I am a girl and I am a dying woman. My body is my journey, the truest record of all I have done and seen, the site of all my joys and heartbreaks, of all my misapprehensions and blinding insights. If I feel the need to relive the journey it is all there written in runes on my body. Even my cells remember it, all that sunshine I bathed in as a child, too much as it turned out. In my beginning is my end.

I thought back to how she had made it through some of the bad times in her life, and I recalled her reading her old leather bound Book of Psalms,

I was a child again, a little feverish and confused, unable to tell the difference between real and phantom, fact and fiction, and I wanted a cool hand on my forehead, a boiled egg with buttered soldiers, any sign at all that I was not abandoned.