By Theodore Dalrymple
There comes a time in a man’s life, and no doubt a woman’s too, when he (or she) turns first to the obituary pages, if any, of a periodical. This is not merely because he fears, or hopes, to find someone he (or she) has known recorded there, though this happens with lamentably increasing frequency, but because it is strangely consolatory, for reasons difficult to explain or enumerate.
Is it complacency or self-congratulation that, unlike those mentioned in the obituary columns, one is still alive, as if to be still alive were proof of one’s wisdom superior to that of the dead? I remember my younger days when I thought that the death of someone must be the result of some fault or failing of the deceased, that he must have made a (fatal) mistake in the way he lived. This thought finds an echo in people who find it surprising, and perhaps unjust, when someone who has followed all the latest health recommendations to the letter, at some cost of effort or forgone pleasure, nevertheless dies.
Neither sun nor death can be stared at for very long, said La Rochefoucauld, and I have observed the truth of this dictum from the front windows of my last two houses, which have both been opposite churches where funerals are sometimes conducted. When the congregation emerges from the church, the conduct of its members leads me to suppose that they, too, think that death was a mistake on the part of the departed, one that they would never make, as they consult their watches to calculate how much more time they may devote to this awkward interruption to their lives, before they return to their more serious avocations. Is this mere bravado, a whistling in the wind, or is it that they truly imagine that the well-known syllogism about the mortality of all men does not apply to them?
But to return to the question of obituaries. Last week, I picked up my copy of the British Medical Journal, an increasingly politicised organ that makes the New York Times seem neutral, balanced and fair-minded, and turned as always first to the obituaries. Doctors outstanding in some way are, quite naturally, given more space than others, and all, unlike the obituaries in days gone by, are provided with a photograph of the deceased, as once there was a vogue, especially in Latin countries, for affixing a small and sometimes enamelled photograph of the interred on his or her tombstone, that faded with time like memory itself.
On this occasion, there was a full-page obituary of Neil Smart, an eminent colorectal surgeon of whom I had no previous knowledge. There is a photograph of him with a luminous smile: and while (perhaps) there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face, I took an immediate liking to him. I should be very surprised ever to learn that he was other than a good man.
The photograph shows him rather young to be dead, but of course one does not expect in these circumstances to see the latest photograph of the deceased. However, on reading the obituary, I learned that he did indeed die at an early age—early, that is, for our times, namely at fifty years old. I read the obituary with a mixture of sorrow, guilt, shame and admiration for its person thus memorialised.
He died of cancer of the oesophagus, and near the time of his death he was due to give a lecture on the latest development to the annual meeting of the association of his surgical subspeciality. Unfortunately, he was too ill to do so. The obituary says:
Delegates [at the meeting] did see him on the screen, however, in a video filmed in his hospice bed a few weeks earlier, just days before his death from cancer aged 50 … “I’m sad to be leaving you on such difficult terms, but there are plenty of others who share my vision. By putting the patient first, at the heart of what we do, we will never go far wrong.”
In the mouth of a hospital bureaucrat, from whom I have heard it expressed many times, the last sentiment would be either a cliché or a lie, the kind of thing he would say while closing down a department for economic reasons, to the great regret of staff and patients alike; but in the mouth of a cancer surgeon himself, dying of cancer, and knowing that he has but a short time to live, his words are surely very moving in their selflessness.
Ihave mentioned that I felt guilt and shame on reading this obituary, and this for two reasons. The first is that, quite without desert, I have been granted by fate a life much longer than his (he was born in the year I became a doctor). I know that length of life is not a reward for virtue, that longevity is not a medal pinned on the breast of people for services to existence, and that, while foolishness can shorten a life, wisdom does not always extend it. But our feelings do not always accord with logical considerations, so guilty with regard to Neil Smart I still feel.
I also feel shame and guilt when I compare what I have done in life with what he did. He devoted himself utterly to a problem of the kind of surgery that he performed, and in finding a solution, he improved greatly the quality of life of his patients. In a sense, he obeyed Blake’s injunction to those who would do good to do good in minute particulars. I cannot claim the same.
Why have I not done so? It is a question of character. I have had neither the patience nor the drive nor even the desire to do good that he had. I console myself with the thought that it takes all sorts to make a world, or a civilisation, and that not everyone can go about doing good in minute particulars, but all the same I feel some shame that I have not done as much concrete good as he, despite a life more than half as long again as his, and still not over. Nor is it probable—indeed, it is vanishingly unlikely—that in my remaining time I shall do a fraction of the concrete good that he did.
Now when I read the obituaries in the BMJ, I am forcibly struck by the number of people who did great good in the world. Naturally, obituaries in general obey the rule of nihil nisi bonum, and there is a decent reversal of Mark Antony’s statement that the evil that men do lives after them while the good that they do lies interred with their bones. But when I look back, I find that I have known far more excellent people in my profession than abominable ones, whom in fact I can count on the fingers of one hand, if that. And I am sure—or at least think it probable—that had I chosen another profession, I should have been able to say the same thing.
But then a difficult question arises, to which I do not know the answer: In a world of so many excellent, well-intentioned, competent people, why is the world in such a lamentable state? Is it because they—whoever they may be, but they are obviously a small minority—have set about maliciously or nefariously to ruin it?
This question, of course, contains an important presupposition, namely that the world is in a lamentable state. But lamentability is not a natural quality such as length or density or specific gravity, it is essentially a comparative term with moral content: lamentable compared with what? The world as it has been, as it ought or we should like it to be?
I find myself veering, or careening, between complacency on the one hand, and despair on the other. If I tell myself that my life is perfectly satisfactory, I accuse myself of callousness or indifference towards all the suffering millions in the world; if I tell myself that the condition of the world is catastrophic because there is so much suffering in the world, I accuse myself of humbug, since I know perfectly well that I take many pleasures, including that of my forthcoming lunch, and that, in my lifetime, I have known many more good people than bad. I feel that I ought to have an indubitably correct attitude, like a tightrope walker high above a circus ring, but I find that it is beyond my ability to find one.
First published in Quadrant Magazine of Australia
