Dialogue: Learning to die a part of living

"People need to learn to die," a friend said with some feeling at the weekend as we discussed the death of young Liam Williams-Holloway.

The friend was making two points and went on to outline them because everyone looked blank after the "people need to learn to die" one-liner.

The first was that it was high time everybody remembered they are mortal.

The second point was that there was much to be said these days for people who accept that death is part of life, even for children.

Her line, ultimately, was that people who decide to deny their kids conventional medical treatment - people who concede, on some level, that living is dying, even in the technological age - are probably the only sane people left.

She certainly thought - as did we all - that Liam's parents were considerably more rational and humane than the Northern Hemisphere parents who recently conceived a child who was drafted, genetically, to serve as a bone-marrow donor for its older, dying sibling. "That's completely ridiculous. It's like when they were growing people in pods for harvesting in The Matrix. That movie was so exactly accurate. Yeah, people need to accept that there are limits in life."

Interesting times. My peers often find vehemently in favour of the likes of Liam's parents. I enter this as admittedly anecdotal evidence that times have probably changed forever.

I remember the time in the 1970s when my small sister was dying of cancer. Things were black and white in those days. If you had a sick child, you put your faith in your doctor and made it your life's work to save your youngster.

You also made it your life's work to blackball anyone who decided to take a different route - anyone, that is, who decided to keep a kiddie out of hospital and let that child take its (generally poor) chances. People went spare at the thought of people denying their kids the likes of blood transfusions and chemotherapy.

I remember how my dear old granny would explode at the very thought of Jehovah's Witnesses.

"They don't love their kiddies the same way that civilised people do," she said. "They just hop around, chanting, with one foot off the floor, while their poor kiddies bleed to death, and then they eat them."

The great irony, of course, was that in those days people who denied their children conventional treatment were realists, probably much more so than they are now. Conventional medicine did not always offer much real hope.

Things tended to go full circle, regardless.

My sister was, I think, given something like a 10 per cent chance of surviving when she was diagnosed with leukaemia in the early 1970s. Exactly two years later, after several harrowing encounters with chemotherapy, she bled to death - a perverse parody, if you like, of granny's portrait of the untransfused, dying Jehovah's Witness child.

My sister died on my birthday - a sheer, and darkly witty, coincidence that drove home the point that there is no ducking some odds.

"We need a death," a friend of mine, a marvellous writer and thinker - one of Bill Manhire's - wrote not long ago in a now-cult Gen X-ish short story about a bunch of lazy, self-satisfied, young middle-class Wellingtonians living, by choice, in a this-is-our-way-of-thumbing-the-nose-at-capitalism hovel in Holloway Rd.

I was taken by that line for a while - it had the ring of truth to it. There's nothing like a good, old-fashioned death, particularly in the family, to help one sort out one's priorities.

The problem today is that there is too much emphasis on life. Siamese twins are separated whether parents like it or not, children are conceived for their bone marrow and people in their 50s get live-donor liver transplants.

And, sure, contemporary medicine is fun, and it's clever and all that. There's just not a lot of humility in it. It proposes that it's possible to cheat death.

It is thus that one takes another look at the standing jokes of yesteryear - the Jehovah's Witnesses and the hippies, the people who choose natural, rather than conventional, medicine.

There's a certain humility in there somewhere, an understanding that a full, happy, healthy life is not necessarily to be taken for granted.

It's interesting to think that these people might now be shaping up as heroes.