A lesson before dying
Authors: Theodore Dalrymple
Journal: BMJ (2008)

My study in the last house in which I lived overlooked a rather splendid church. From time to time as I sat at my desk I would watch a funeral procession arrive and depart from it.

The funerals were all of well-off people, to judge by the cars that the mourners drove. When the funeral service was over, the mourners would emerge from the church and at once answer the messages on their mobile phones, or look with anxiety at their watches. The funeral of the departed had obviously come at a most inconvenient moment: really, with a little effort, he could have timed his death better. But when is a convenient moment for death?

In reaction to, or illustrative of, what has been called the “crisis” in the Western attitude to death consequent upon the decline in religious belief since the 19th century, the Franco-Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco wrote a play entitled The King Departs (Le Roi se meurt), which was first staged in 1962. One of the six characters is the doctor, who is also the surgeon, executioner, bacteriologist, and astrologer to the king.

The king, Berenger I, has two wives, Marguerite and Marie, a guard, and a woman who doubles as nurse and cleaning lady called Juliette. During Berenger’s reign, the kingdom has all but collapsed. It is now a small, depopulated desert, natality has fallen to zero, the few remaining children are goitrous cretins or otherwise suffering from mental retardation, the two government ministers have disappeared while fishing in a stream, and the palace has fallen into near ruins. The king has an hour and a half to live, but has not yet been told that he is terminally ill, and when told protests that, as king, he has the right to stay alive or at least choose the hour of his death, and in any case is not ready yet to die, for he has not prepared himself.

The doctor is completely heartless and unsympathetic to the king’s fear of death. When Queen Marguerite points out that Berenger had her parents killed, as well as his brothers, cousins, the families of his cousins, and even their cattle, the doctor adds, “Your Majesty said that they were all going to die one day anyway.”

As to preparing for death, he says to the king, who is pleading for more time: “A well-filled hour is worth more than centuries and centuries of frivolity and neglect. Five minutes is enough, ten seconds of awareness. He’s been give an hour: sixty minutes, three thousand six hundred seconds. He’s lucky.”

And when the king appeals to the spirits of suicides to help him learn to despise life, the doctor says, “I could prescribe mood-lifting or tranquillising pills.”

When finally the dying king says that he would like some pot-au-feu, the doctor intervenes, saying, “Pot-au-feu is not recommended for the health of the dying.”

Ionesco, who had no very high opinion of doctors and the pretensions of medicine, is telling us that, in the face of inevitable oblivion, medicine is futile, a displacement activity. Then, of course, so is everything else. It is man’s tragedy, says Ionesco, that he knows that his life is futile, but cannot live as if it were.

I note, however, that he was buried according to the Romanian Orthodox rite.

Ionesco, who had no very high opinion of doctors and the pretensions of medicine, is telling us that, in the face of inevitable oblivion, medicine is futile, a displacement activity