So many words for dying, deceasing, expiring, succumbing, giving up the ghost, meeting one’s end, passing away, being taken from us, meeting one’s maker, going to a better place, breathing one’s last ... If the numerosity of words and phrases for things really correlated with speakers’ degrees of interest in them (a dumb but extremely popular belief I have critiqued before), we would have to assume that English speakers are fascinated by death in all its forms and discuss it all the time in technical detail. But of course they aren’t and don’t. Most of the huge clutch of synonyms are euphemisms, existing precisely because people don’t want to discuss death at all.
People won’t even tolerate its mention. Patients facing terminal illness who want to talk about their impending death find even longstanding friends pushing them away: “Oh, don’t talk like that! You’re strong, you’ll outlive us all!”
Jamie Lawson’s astonishingly accomplished song “Wasn’t Expecting That” takes the risk of talking about death, deftly and allusively. It tells the story of a romance that begins very gently with “Just a delicate kiss anyone could have missed” but blossoms into deep love and a lengthy marriage.
The story of that marriage is told with remarkable economy: In nine words (“Time doesn’t take long; Three kids up and gone ... ") the song fast-forwards to late middle age after the children have left home. A happy-ever-after story. But no, it isn’t; the song has one more chilling twist:
When the nurses they came
Said “it’s come back again”
I wasn’t expecting that.
Then you closed your eyes
You took my heart by surprise;
I wasn’t expecting that.
The small inaccuracy in the lyrics there (Jamie is clearly not telling this story from personal experience) is that “nurses” should be “doctors.” Nurses are never allowed to break the news that primary breast cancer has resurfaced in metastasized form. They can’t use the c-word until after confirmation by the specialists. X-ray operators can’t even say “tumor": They talk about a “mass” or a “shadow.” Junior doctors say things like “There are some indications of disease,” and “We think you should see a specialist.”
But Tricia could see the image on the screen during the ultrasound scan of her liver. “It lit up like a Christmas tree,” she told me. And she saw the expression on the face of the machine’s operator, and knew the truth instantly. Moreover, she could see that the young woman had never been in this unsettling situation before: knowing that the patient in front of her had terminal cancer, and not knowing what to say.
It was typical of Tricia that her first concern was with a junior medical technician’s feelings. “It’s all right,” she said; “I know what it means. You don’t have to worry about what to say to me.” Facing a diagnosis that meant she was going to die (secondary breast cancer metastasized to the liver and bones isn’t likely to be curable), her reaction was to offer words of comfort to someone else, someone who had looked at a screen foretelling her future but wasn’t permitted to say, “It’s come back again.”
Tricia’s appointment with her oncologist was on Friday, November 21, 2014. She trusted him. Years before, after her breast-cancer surgery, he had encouraged her through some very tough chemotherapy at a low point in her life by assuring her that he really could cure what she had. But that was then. Several years had passed. Now he knew he had to tell her the truth: “This time I can’t fix it.”
Tricia came with me on a brief lecture trip to Vienna that I was committed to, and then we returned to Edinburgh to continue preparing for our wedding, which had been planned before her diagnosis when we thought we had decades ahead of us.
The wedding day was wonderful. But we already knew that our marriage would end prematurely with her death. We didn’t know how many days we had, so we made all of them count, and made sure we had some fun. (The photo above is from this past November, when she was completely bald from a year of palliative chemotherapy but dressed up to go out to the turkey dinner that the American faculty in Informatics and Linguistics at my university organize each Thanksgiving. We had a great time.)
She fought for life, but her condition worsened dramatically at the beginning of this year. When she drew her last breath on Saturday evening, January 30, 2016, as I sat alone with her and held her hand, we’d had 13 months to say goodbye. Rationally, it shouldn’t have taken my heart by surprise. Yet it did. The grief came down on me like a hammer blow. I wasn’t expecting that.