Dying without an appointment

… Not a whit, we defy augury; there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Doctors do their best, mostly, but they can't always live up to other people's expectations. If you're really ill, you might ask how long you've got, but I don't think I'd bother, nor would I encourage my nearest and dearest to ask, unless my death was imminent and they needed to go and top up a parking meter or visit the loo.

I forget who it was, but I did hear a story about a woman who was given months to live and was still alive twenty years later. Doesn't happen often, but it happens. Another story, told to me by his widow, was about a man who died within days of being taken ill. He'd had an undiagnosed cancer. It wasn't so much the suddenness of it that upset her, as having to have a post mortem. As a Jew whose relatives had been subjected to medical experimentation in a Nazi concentration camp, she hated the thought of him being sliced open.

Trouble is, medicine isn't an exact science and you can't always predict how our bodies will behave. A consultant neurologist explains why doctors get prognoses wrong:

Every patient is different, every disorder is different, every disorder within a disorder is different. People are unpredictable, their illness even more so. But there exist other subtleties that are harder to admit to.

If you develop a life-threatening illness, you might write a bucket list, give away all your belongings, or even plan to go to Dignitas. The latter involves assuming that you'll deteriorate fairly quickly, but there's no way of knowing that. If you didn't commit suicide, you might experience remission and be around for years.

Then there's all the rubbish about bravely "fighting" an illness, usually cancer, or the other euphemism - losing a "battle". It's all such twaddle.

Thinking about the causes of death of the people whose funerals I've conducted, a significant proportion have had illnesses that lasted months or years, yet enjoyed life in spite of it. Some have been very old, and were just worn out and glad to go. Some have just gone - whoosh! - struck down by a heart attack, cerebral haemorrhage (like my mum), or a lorry. There's no point speculating about how you'll die. Concentrate on living, and don't expect your doctor to give you an appointment for anything other than a consultation.

Illustration © M Nelson 2000