About two years ago, having been recently informed that my breast cancer had spread to my bones, I became a little obsessed with a quote from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I’d like to pretend this was because I was loftily rereading classic literature as I grappled with this shocking and unwelcome diagnosis, but really it was because I’d been seeking escape from the real world in the comforting arms of Netflix, where a new television adaptation of David Nicholls’s brilliant book One Day had landed.
The Hardy quote provided the inspiration for his best-selling novel: “She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year. Her own birthday, and every other day individualised by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought, one afternoon, that there was another date, of greater importance than all those; that of her own death; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?”
Nicholls has written about how he was inspired by this “thrillingly morbid idea, the notion of an anti-birthday lurking sly and unseen in the calendar. A death-day”. He used it as a clever device in the book, which follows his characters Emma and Dexter over two decades. “How does a novelist sum up 20 years? That passage from Tess provided a clue, and the novel became 20 snapshots of a seemingly ordinary day, the significance of which would lie, sly and unseen, throughout the novel,” he has written.
During the days and weeks after my diagnosis, I’d occasionally wonder about my own death day. It was there somewhere, lurking sly and unseen, but when exactly was it? This became a necessary but not exactly cheering thought. I felt it was important to let my brain go there even if it was somewhat terrifying to contemplate. Gradually, as the shock subsided, I learned to live with my new reality. The idea of a death-day written in invisible ink somewhere on my life’s calendar became less of a monstrous notion and more like a useful fact to remember.
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My friend Alex did me a good deed recently, and an incident that happened during the course of that good deed reminded me of the Tess of the D’Urbervilles quote. We’d been on a glorious mini-break outside of Dublin, and Alex was driving me an hour and a half out of her way so that I could get back to the Mater hospital in time to have my port removed.
A port, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is a small medical device implanted under the skin. I’d had it put in two years ago to make it easier to have my weekly chemotherapy infusions. Since then the port has lurked, not so much sly but mostly unseen, under my chest. I don’t need it any more, not for now anyway, so I had asked whether it could be removed. My doctors agreed, and so I was off to the Mater for the straightforward procedure under a local anaesthetic.
But first we had to get there. I was the one navigating. I was the one who, at a nightmarish-looking junction close to the Red Cow Luas station, told Alex to turn right. She dutifully turned right, at which point we realised we were on the Luas tracks and to our left, hurtling towards us at top speed, was a Luas.
I shouted. “There’s a Luas!” stating the obvious, at which point there were all manner of beeping noises. Alex, meanwhile, put her foot down on the accelerator and got us out of the path of the oncoming tram. As she eloquently put it when we’d parked up on the grounds of a nearby hotel and took a much-needed moment to calm down: “We were nearly squished by the Luas but we weren’t squished, that’s the main thing.”
We could have been squished, but we weren’t. It wasn’t our death day
As the navigator, I blame myself for what happened. As the driver, Alex blames herself. Really, as Glinda and Elphaba sing in Wicked: For Good, “I guess we know there’s blame to share, and none of it really matters any more.” (I’ve watched the new movie twice so far; I will watch it again. One of my favourite scenes is Cynthia Erivo singing No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, a pertinent adage I reminded Alex about in our many text-message exchanges about our near miss.)
The main thing is, it was not our day to die. Our anti-birthdays will fall on another date. I thought about this later as I lay in the Mater under local anaesthetic, and the doctor expertly extracted my port. We could have been squished, but we weren’t. It wasn’t our death day, but it was yet another reminder of an important idea we should never lose sight of as we move through this life.
We all have a death day lurking sly and unseen. When is mine? When is yours? We can’t know. What we do know is that it’s going to happen some day. One Day. The thought might not be pretty, but it is powerful and perspective-shifting. And always worth remembering.
