Sue Wootton
Poet, essayist and all-round international man of letters, Clive James, was diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema in 2010. He wasn’t expected to survive long, but he’s still here, and writing the best work of his life. And this is largely, he says, because of death. There is nothing like intimations of your own mortality to sharpen your focus on what makes life worth living:
I am here now, who was hardly even there.”
In 2015 he published what he thought would be his farewell collection of poetry, Sentenced to Life. Last year, kicking on, as it were, like “an exhausted footballer with legs of lead”, he published another collection, called (with typical Clive James wit) Injury Time.
In 2003, a year after our youngest daughter died, my husband Chris and I travelled from our home in New Zealand to Oman to live and work for a year. The challenges of living in this fascinating culture helped us learn to live with our grief in a way we couldn’t at home. Gradually I regained my ability to write. When we got back to New Zealand, I started recording our experiences from that time. This is one of the stories.
Kathryn Perks explains what prompted her to write a guide to putting our affairs in order before we die.
Three years ago my partner asked me to deliver a gift to Carolyn, a friend of hers who was a patient at the