It’s been all go. After breakfast Treena brought a basin of warm water, a bar of soap and a face flannel into the bedroom. Not wanting to cede control of my personal hygiene, on top of all the other recent great and small losses of personal autonomy, even down to cutting up my own food, I have until now resisted her offer to wash me.
She pulled my T-shirt over my head. I lifted my arms and she gently soaped my armpits, an act which seemed more intimate somehow than making love. Now, with my arms aloft, seemed as good a time as any to broach the subject. “How about,” I suggested conversationally, “if I just swallowed, say, twenty or thirty of the red, short-acting morphine capsules. Wouldn’t I gently drift off to sleep? And wouldn’t that be a nice and easy way for me to go?”
Wringing out the flannel into the bowl and starting on my back with wide circular motions, the former nurse considered my proposition, again from a strictly practical point of view. The evening before, my usual morphine dose, plus some extra, unofficial capsules, had failed to mask the pain, which had achieved a new and inconceivable sharpness. The failure of the prescribed morphine dose to do its job felt like another passing milestone; in this case, the significant milestone after which one begins to ask the inevitable question.
Depending on her mood, Elody either gives you the worst haircut you’ve ever had or the second worst
The flannel didn’t falter in its careful, gentle circling. “I was wondering when you were going to ask,” she said carefully. “Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as that. The trouble is you would vomit them up and your dying would be a messy, prolonged and distressing business, for all concerned. You would need to swallow an anti-emetic with the morphine.”
“Can’t we then simply get some anti-emetic pills from the chemist?” I said. “I’ll tell the doctor that the chemotherapy is making me throw up.”
Finally she advised patience and meanwhile to write a will. Sooner or later the oncologist would prescribe the morphine to be delivered automatically by something called a “syringe driver.” If I were attached to one of those, a sympathetic doctor could end it with no questions asked by turning the dial up to eleven, which would send me off to sleep, then to oblivion. She had heard tell, she said, that in France it was fairly normal practice to expedite a painful ending in this way.
Leaving me to soap my undercarriage, she left the bedroom. Half an hour later she returned with a hairdresser. She’d driven down to the village to fetch her.
The lovely Elody. For twenty minutes I sat on a chair and looked out of the window while Elody snipped at my head. Depending on her mood, Elody either gives you the worst haircut you’ve ever had or the second worst. Today she was chirpy and gave me a half-decent one.
Afterwards I dressed and we tottered down the cliff path and for the first time in two weeks I went on a short journey in the passenger seat of a car. Our destination was the closest large town, Barjols, to a commercial laboratory for a blood test. Goodness gracious, it was all go that morning.
The ride was twenty minutes each way on a wide empty road through oak woods, vineyards and across a broad, flat river valley. Halfway along this road is a tricolore and carved monument dedicated to the squad of communist Maquis massacred by the Nazis on a nearby hillside in 1944. “It’s strange,” I said to Catriona as we passed it. “But since broaching the subject I feel very much happier all of a sudden.” “Which subject?” she said, eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Killing myself,” I said. And we laughed and laughed.
It was perfectly true. It’s the helplessness and inexorable loss of personal autonomy that depresses the spirit. The unforeseen possibility of taking back control, even by swallowing too many pills, when it came down to it, was tremendously cheering and all felt well with me again.
Going down the path to get to the car was one thing. Getting back up again from the car to the house was another. But by taking it very slowly, and stopping every few yards, I made it. I mounted the stairs to the bedroom and lay back on the bed panting like a greyhound after a course. Then I propped up the iPad on the writing board and started to write this column.
As I write, Catriona is coming and going, modeling outfits in the swing mirror. This afternoon we are getting married in the town hall in a brief civil ceremony conducted by the mayor. As I say, it’s all go. “Lovely, darling,” I tell her with perfect honesty as each new dress is paraded in front of me. “Beautiful.” And she is. Inside and out. I’m a lucky man. And today I’m a very happy one too.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
