quote from the Observer 22.04.2012, Rachel Cooke: “I received an email recently from PR agency Freud Communications. The email urged me to watch on YouTube a short film about the Labour peer and strategist Philip Gould, who died of esophageal cancer in November 2011. The film, When I Die, was made in the last fortnight of Gould’s life.
“Philip was committed to sharing his experiences through one final campaign,” said the email. “He showed that for the terminally ill and those closest to them, there can be moments of joy, resolution and inspiration in those final weeks just as intense as those of fear, discomfort and sadness.”
The writer of the email then encouraged me, if I felt able, to share the film with others via social media. There was even a hashtag for me to use, should I feel like posting something on Twitter. Well, I wandered about my office a bit, looking at the towering cairn of books I need to read, the notes I must type up, the newspapers I should recycle. Naturally, I wanted to watch the film. I was curious; people would soon be talking about it. But I felt indignant, too. The synthetic hullabaloo. The bizarre proposition that even death is now some kind of a lifestyle choice.
Gould, warm and wise and clear, has a valedictory nobility I’ve only ever found before in a fine novel or a great portrait. How the jauntiness of his brightly striped scarf pierces the heart! When he stands on his grave in London’s Highgate cemetery, among all that dripping green, his comfort in knowing that this is the ground that will embrace him for eternity is almost tangible. I half expected him to bend down and pat the grass, the way a person, tender and proprietorial, might pat a blanket when they have finished making a bed.
The film hopes, I think, to help us to talk about death and if it succeeds, this can only be a good thing. Once, we were so good at grief. There was a pattern to it. We knew what to do because our ancestors, whose experience was bitter, had taught us. When I turned 40, my mother gave me – this was at my request; she’s not a total weirdo – a Victorian mourning locket, made of jet. It’s a lovely object, one of those things that feels good in the palm of the hand. But it also strikes me every time I look at it that a century ago, it was an essential element in the long but signposted recovery programme of some poor widow
Slingshot