Earlier this week I read The
Shepherd’s Crown, the last novel Terry Pratchett wrote before he died. And
then this morning I am listening to David Bowie’s new album Blackstar. Two artists making art out of
their own deaths.
In the video of
Lazarus, Bowie lets us see him looking wasted and frail, lying on a bed, his
veined hands clutching at the covers. He must have known it was only a matter
of time before he’d be playing out that scene for real. Pratchett’s work is in
some ways even more poignant, because while Bowie gives us permission to see
the degeneration of his body, Pratchett gives us permission to see the
degeneration of his mind. Every word of Shepherd’s
Crown is a painful reminder that an extraordinary intellect was fading
fast, and I’d be prepared to bet that Sir Terry knew that, and just bloody well
wrote it anyway. The humility of both artists is astonishing. They are showing
us what it is like to die.
I don’t have any comforting answers to the
questions raised by death. Mostly I deal with the idea of dying by trying to
ignore it. It’s painful and grotesquely lacking in dignity, and it never ends
well. But one way of dealing with things that scare us is to try and understand
them better, and Bowie and Pratchett have helped us a little with that. Godspeed,
gentlemen.
Last year, Oliver Sacks has written about his own death in this way; sadly he too is gone.
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