Sinclair on life: Life too full to be mawkish

By PETER SINCLAIR

The art of the swansong, the urge to transform fatality into art, comprises a small but notable group of writers.

Among them are Dennis Potter, Morrie Schwartz, the incomparable John Diamond of the London Times, whose voice faded into silence just over a month ago - it was their gift to continue creating until the final moment of their lives, fearlessly detailing the crumbling brink on which they stood.

This new column of mine, then, is in line of descent from writers far more able than I am.

As specialists puzzle over bits of me I didn't even know I had, the Herald has given me the opportunity to look back, ahead, sideways to talk to myself, as it were, so that perhaps I'll be able to sum it all up and work out a map of the route which brought me here.

For when you're standing where I am, memory is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope - everything distanced yet strangely sharper, remote but clear. The light falls on things from a different angle, so that their significance changes and you see the world differently.

And that is partly what this column is about.

There are some things this column will not be: it will not be about cancer. And above all, it will not be about death.

I have always loved life, and as my visa approaches its expiry date I still do. So in a way this column will be a sort of love-letter on top of everything else.

For I have always loved people, too, almost indiscriminately. I am a puppy of a man. Looking back, I think it was all those Telethons which did it, for it is impossible to host a Telethon, let alone several, without acquiring a huge fellow-feeling for your countrymen. It was then, I think, that I realised Kiwis had to be the warmest race on earth, and I was proud to be accepted as an honorary one (I am sshh! Australian by birth).

In the wake of my disclosure in this newspaper about what was happening to me, I received a torrent of email - from politicians and possum-hunters, from housewives, factory hands and judges. I don't want to get mawkish about it, but these messages of goodwill touched and moved me deeply.

I tried to reply to as many as I could; but to those who may have been overlooked, let me thank you now.

I've never been much of a navel-gazer. I have been too busy living my life to pause and analyse it, or my place in the world, at all closely. It wasn't until I heard from so many of you, and read what you had to say of the niche I had come to occupy in some people's lives, that it was really brought home to me.

All I was doing, as I thought, was earning a living by hosting television shows. It is only now, here in this nick of time, that I've come to understand at last that I really did mean something to many of you; which in turn means that my life itself has meant something.

That is a humbling and priceless reward. All I can offer you in return is my thanks for letting me know.

Nor should I forget the dozens of you who sent me all those colourful cures for leukaemia. They ranged from vibration and aromatherapies through wildly unconventional herbal concoctions to that fine old medical standby, the Bible. My thanks to all of you; but for better or worse I have placed my treatment in the hands of Dr Peter Browett and his team at Auckland Hospital, and there it will remain.

And now, having got all that off my chest, I'd better promise you something a bit more entertaining next week; for let us never forget that frivolity is the gift of age as well as of youth, and that entertainment shares equal place in our lives with enlightenment.

I hope you'll join me then, talking to myself as the sun goes down.