Dying by Cory Taylor Read Free Book Online

powerless over my fate, and that for once in my life I am free of the tyranny
of choice. That way I waste a lot less time feeling singled out or cheated.
    As I told the young psychologist, I rely on friends to divert me from dark thoughts.
I don’t have a lot of friends, but the ones I do have are so good to me, so tender
and solicitous, it would seem ungrateful to subside into unhappiness or depression.
And then there’s Shin, without whom I’d be lost. He’s been so good-humoured and loving;
I owe him no less than my sanity. If I’m ever depressed or unhappy, I hide the fact
from him as best I can. It’s the least I can do.
    No, I’m not likely to take more risks in life, now that I know I’m dying. I’m not
about to tackle skydiving orparagliding. I’ve always been physically cautious, preternaturally
aware of all the things that can go wrong when one is undertaking a dangerous activity.
Paradoxically, it was Dad who taught me to be careful. I don’t think he was temperamentally
suited to flying; the risks played unhealthily on his mind and made him fearful,
tetchy, depressed. At the same time he was addicted to the thrill of flying and couldn’t
give it up.
    His ambivalence about danger confused me while I was growing up. He never discouraged
me from taking up risky activities; instead he filled me with fear about the possible
consequences, with the result that I was never any good at them. When he taught me
to drive, he made sure to emphasise the fallibility of the machine, something he
would have learned during the war at flying school, where mistakes could be fatal.
He liked to open the bonnet of the car before we set off, and run through a sort
of flight check with me to make sure everything was hooked up to everything else.
These were good lessons and they’ve served me well, but I wonder if a certain enthusiasm
for risk drained out of me as a result of his teaching methods, and whether that
wasn’t his intent. It strikes me that I might have turned out differently if he’d
taken me for a spin one day in one of the Tiger Moths he loved so much, shown me
what had turned him on to flying in the first place, emphasised the mad joy rather
than the danger.
    The irony is that, despite my never having tempted death the way daredevils do, I’m
dying anyway. Perhaps it is a mistake to be so cautious. I sometimes think this is
the true reason for my reluctance to take my own life. It is because suicide is so
dangerous.
    I shall miss you so much when I’m dead : Harold Pinter, dying of cancer, speaking
of his wife. I know exactly what he means.
    The short answer to the question of what I’ll miss the most is Shin, my husband of
thirty-one years, and the faces of my children.
    The long answer is the world and everything in it: wind, sun, rain, snow and all
the rest.
    And I will miss being around to see what happens next, how things turn out, whether
my children’s lives will prove as lucky as my own.
    But I will not miss dying. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever done, and I
will be glad when it’s over.
    I’d like to be remembered by what I’ve written. As somebody once warned, if you
don’t tell your own story, someone else will.
    But I know I have no real say in how I will be remembered. It is in the nature of
memory that different people will remember different things, and that none of whatthey remember will be verifiable or true. This is the case even in my own recollections
about my life, which are porous and mutable and open to contradictory interpretations.
If I use them in my work, which I often do, it is to fit them into a particular narrative,
to shape them to a purpose, because that is how fiction is made. In the process,
I become convinced that the fictional version of my memory is the real version, or
at least preferable to it. It is a thoroughly self-serving exercise, I know, but
that is part of its attraction.
    In the end it is a blessing to be remembered at all, and we should not