Are you afraid of death?

I've always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I'm sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn't work very well because it didn't make room for the young. It didn't know how the world was fifty years ago. It didn't know how the world was twenty years ago. It saw it as it is today, without any preconceptions, and dreamed how it could be based on that. We're not satisfied based on the accomplishment of the last thirty years. We're dissatisfied because the current state didn't live up to their ideals. Without death there would be very little progress.

Somebody who won't go to the doctor for a normal checkup is fearful and nervous. ... But once you find out what it's like on the other side, you can go beyond fear.

Did the Victorians fear death? As Death says in one of my own books, most men don't fear death, they fear those things – the knife, the shipwreck, the illness, the bomb – that proceed, by micro seconds if you're lucky and many years if you're not, the moment of death.

But if I was sitting in an armchair with bits and pieces of rubber sticking out of me and my son came over and said, you know, would you like a banana? Wink once for yes, wink twice for no, I dont think the interest of the conversation would get me past the sense that this is horrible. It's horrible for me but above all, horrible for them. There are things worse than death.

Yes, these are subjects that we think about all the time but don’t necessarily talk about. Everybody has thought about if they want to be cremated, buried, or whatever.

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

From the moment I resolved and reconciled things with Gail the fear went. I don't feel I've got any fear now. I think acceptance is the key. If you accept death, fear disappears.

Yes. Of course. And since I don't believe in another world, in another life, that this is it. And when they die they are out of my life. They're gone forever. Blank. Blank. Blank. And I am not afraid of death. And I begin to - as maybe a good many elderly people do. Who knows? When I did "Bumble-ardy" I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and my partner, was dying here in the house while I did "Bumble-ardy." And I did "Bumble-ardy" to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

These matters have become discussable with one’s friends, not, of course, as a frequent part of gossip over lunch in the dining room (our only communal occasion) but from time to time, perhaps when admiring someone’s stoicism if their frailty is becoming painfully apparent, or feeling sad at someone else’s inability to accept what seems to be imminent. As a result of this openness, I think that most of the people here would consider it foolish to be frightened of being dead. All of us, however, feel some degree of anxiety about the process of dying.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

At first I - I felt that it was confined to my liver and that they had - the operation had completely removed it. And so I felt quite relieved. And then that same afternoon we had an MRI of my head and neck and it showed up that it was already in four places in my brain. So I would say that night and the next day, until I came back up to Emory, I just thought I had a few weeks left. But I was surprisingly at ease. You know, I've had a wonderful life. I've had thousands of friends and I've had an exciting and adventurous and gratifying existence. So I was surprisingly at ease, much more so than my wife was.

Missing a few months of feeling awful, being dead, versus not missing those months of feeling awful. Dead, at least theoretically, is the less painful of the two options, assuming that dead equals not being at all. Whatever terror there is lies in the present fear of dying, not so much of death. The stoics tell me that I’ve been ‘dead’ before, prior to my birth, and that was no hardship, was it? Back to Beckett, I think.

I’ve had a couple of ex-girlfriends sort of accuse me of having a personality disorder! … No, I don’t know. I’ve always been afraid of death. I’ve never wanted to die. Last year, I watched this guy die in Red Rock. It was this horrible freak accident thing. He fell and he cracked his head and basically just bled out. That was the first time I’d ever actually seen a climbing accident like that. It was kind of sobering — he was even wearing a helmet — it was a reminder of how dangerous climbing can be if things go wrong even when you have all the ropes on.

But Larkin was different. He knew it would end in silence, and he was afraid of the silence. He didn’t like the idea of not being here. I’m not like that – and my death might come as a relief to quite a few people. I’d rather like it not to hurt, that’s all.

It was fear of suffering before dying, and of, you know, lingering on, being in a hospital bed. And I hate hospitals, always have done. I think they're horrible places, even though I spent most of my life working in them. No, it's really - death itself holds no fears for me at all, as far as - I love the famous 18th century philosopher David Hume, who on his deathbed was asked, aren't you terribly worried about what will happen after death? And he said, no, I'm no more worried about not existing after death than I'm worried about not existing before I was born. And that is my view about death. I don't believe in an afterlife. But I know, as a doctor, that dying can be very unpleasant.

I don’t think so! You can’t really know that until the moment of your death, at which point you will probably not be afraid because you won’t be there. I have a very old friend who called me last year to say, “Okay I am done. I am not fighting this anymore. I am checking out. I am calling to say goodbye because I am not really conscious most of the time. I am cutting off the pain killers.” He seemed okay. That was not the moment of his death, but it was within two or three days.

I'm sort of - not looking forward to my final day - of course that's the wrong way to see it. But I'm kind of curious about it, and I'm happy and I'm ready. As Julian of Norwich said: "All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

We received death threats, yes, but you see when you are in a struggle, there are going to have to be casualties, and why should you be exempt? But I often said, “Look, here, God, if I’m doing your work, then you jolly well are going to have to look after me!” And God did God’s stuff.