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.
My nine year old self heard the doctor’s stern words and took to heart that he was calling me fat. I was an active child and my family mostly ate nutritious foods. But when we ate, we ate a lot.
My next appointment for the Urology Department was 29 March. I was eager to get it under my belt, to get my results and be able to move on to getting the anticipated rebore. To my abject despair and shock, the doctor informed me that I had prostate cancer. Not only that, but it was Gleason Score 10, which is as high as the scale goes. The most aggressive and fastest-growing form of the cancer going. Ten minutes that changed my life.
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.