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“Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged…”
DEATH IS NOTHING AT ALL – Henry Scott Holland1
If this quote seems familiar, perhaps like me you heard it read aloud at a funeral. Maybe you yourself read it aloud because you needed to say a few words during a memorial service.
Official Trailer
It is surely no mere coincidence that the next room is evoked in the title of Pedro Almodovar‘s powerful new film about dying called The Room Next Door, the Spanish director’s first full-length feature in English. Death is no negligible accident here,2 but part of a plan where the main character, Martha, who is terminally ill, asks Ingrid, an old friend, to share a house with her until she takes the pill which will end her life. The fatal act, however, does not take place in Ingrid‘s presence. Martha says she always sleeps with the door open, so the closed door to her room is to be the agreed sign to inform Ingrid that the planned act has been accomplished.
The film is an adaptation of a recent American novel, What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez. I haven’t read the book, but the film weaves together multiple threads. Among these we find terminal illness and dying, the right to choose when to die and how to go about organising it, the conflict between freedom of choice and religious condemnation of self-killing, assisted dying and the law.3
Almodovar readily admits that writing and making movies “is a way of running away from death”, and while the film carefully mixes drama with moments of dark humour, it certainly doesn’t pull back from asking some tough questions.
I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the experience in case you haven’t seen it. This isn’t a story that is going to go away. Some time soon, or maybe in the more distant future, it will cross your path. Definitely worth a look. Go with a friend. Choose that friend carefully.
Catching your death
It’s true that death isn’t exactly what you’d call a catchy subject, and we can easily spend our lives, like Almodovar, running away from it. But death catches up with us all eventually.
In the days which followed seeing The Room Next Door, I found myself remembering an expression my mother used to use when we were kids : be careful or you’ll catch your death. Of course, in this expression, catching your death referred to catching a cold or a severe chill and falling ill, not necessarily dying. It was a reminder to wrap up warm against the English weather. It was also used to tell us to close a door or window to keep a draught out of a room or out of the house.
The phrase stayed with me and kept sounding in my head after seeing the film. What was the connection? I wondered. Then it came to me : it was the door! You go through a door into the next room, and Martha closed the door as a sign to her friend. Death’s door? Is there a door to death? That was it. I had to find a text I had written about the last time I saw my mother alive.
Some people take pictures of things they want to keep. I also take pictures with words. Here is a dyptich. The first part is a picture of my mother at death’s door during palliative care. The second is a picture drawn from the question I was left with the day she slipped away, which was two years ago today. The linking phrase is : “So tell me now.”
DEATH’S DOOR
You look up at me
From your cleverbed
With a light in your eyes
So unexpected
That I’m shaken up.
The warmth of your glow.
The smile that you shine.
Your voice is the slow
But gentle creeper
In and out of sleep.
My oral memory
Checks though the archives
Of wisdom and wit,
A myth kept alive
That Mother knows best.
We’ve seen you be chatty,
And sometimes, tongue-tied.
But today you’ve a face
Turned towards a space
Where a door should open.
So tell me now.
Is there a door to death?
Or is it just a place imagined
By the living who fear their end?
What comes before loss of breath?
Is there a secret switch that flips
Somewhere between lung and lips?
When the end comes, do we know?
Or is there nothing to gaze upon?
Just simply there, then simply gone?
There were no witnesses to your leaving
That morning you’d been, then weren’t.
You were no more,
There was no door.
Just a draught,
In which you
Caught your death
In the very caress
In which death
Caught you.
- This is from Death is nothing at all, written by Henry Scott Holland based on the funeral homily he gave following the death of the English king, Edward VII, in 1910. ↩︎
- Another reference to Death is nothing at all : “What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner.” The full text is available on the Wikipedia page about Scott Holland. ↩︎
- Assisted dying, currently being discussed by Parliament in the UK has become a topical issue, finally something to be talked about openly. ↩︎
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