My Year Off Read Online Free Page A

physical catastrophe, I shall always feel intensely grateful.
    Sarah arrived from San Francisco, white and hollow-faced with worry and loss of sleep. For the first week, she slept on a camp bed in the corner of my room, jumping up in alarm whenever I stirred in sleep, though I do not remember this. She had endured her own terrible drama en route. ‘Robert isn’t feeling very well,’ my mother had said, and her ominous telephone manner had led Sarah to believe, she told me later, that I was likely to die at any moment. In a daze she had got a flight to London, and had spent the eleven-hour trip huddled under a blanket, drinking shots of whisky. Shesays she had never felt so alone as she did that night, in the darkened plane surrounded by people. At one point she turned in desperation to her neighbour. ‘Do you mind if I talk to you a moment?’ she said. ‘My husband’s just had a stroke.’ The woman looked at her. ‘I don’t know anything about strokes,’ she said, and went back to
Cosmopolitan
.
    Sometimes, it seems that no one knows anything about stroke. The word itself sounds so inoffensive. As a verb, it’s a synonym for brush or sweep or caress. You ‘stroke’ a baby or a lover, and of course it’s also associated with idleness, as in ‘he never does a stroke of work’. And then again it’s linked, more accurately now, with old age, though even here it’s seen as a survivable affliction. History reminds us that both Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill functioned as, respectively, President and Prime Minister, after suffering mild strokes in old age. (Wilson’s, of course, was serious; he never really recovered from it and the United States government was effectively run, during the last years of his presidency, by his fierce wife, Edith.) Such behaviour would be unthinkable today — the media would not permit it — though until one of the world’s leaders suffers a serious stroke in office it’s likely that the public will remain, like the woman on the plane, ill-informed and largely indifferent. In Britain, the fact that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s father, Leo, suffered a severe stroke at the age of forty has helped to raise the public profile of an affliction that is either taken for granted or misunderstood. Perhaps if Sarah had confided to the woman what she most feared — that I would be dead by the time she landed at Heathrow — she might have elicited a more sympathetic response.
    In the life of twentieth-century man and woman thereare not many mysteries, but Death remains. In an age when more and more is explained, when even the brain is slowly beginning to yield up its secrets, the Grim Reaper shows no sign of losing his ancient power to fascinate and terrify. And those who contrive, however briefly, to meet him and yet survive also exert a special hold on our imaginations. As my convalescence unfolded, I discovered a substantial and fascinating literature on the subject of death, of which the most notable is the poet John Donne’s
Devotions
.
    Donne, a near-contemporary of William Shakespeare, was a friend of Robert Harvey, the pioneer of cardiac ‘circulation’, and had what we would think of as a distinctly twentieth-century appreciation of the body and its limitations as the vessel of our humanity. Like many writers of his time, Donne addressed Death as a familiar, and we know him for his oft-quoted sonnet, ‘Death be not proud’. What his less well-known
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
reveals is a mind acutely tuned, in a rather modern way, to the psycho-drama of sudden illness. ‘A sick bed is a grave;’ Donne writes, ‘and all that the patient says there, is but a varying of his own Epitaph.’
    By a strange coincidence, a few days after my stroke a media acquaintance and fellow forty-something, Michael Vermeulen, the London editor of
Esquire
, died of a heart-attack brought on, apparently, by years of hard living. I read his obituaries in hospital with guilty