Peter Costello
Claire Gibert at home
and well again. Miles to go before I sleep: Letters on hope, death and learning to live
by Claire Gilbert (Hodder &Stoughton, £16.99)
Out this month, Claire Gilbert’s unusual book which might have been a memoir of dying, becomes instead a celebration of living. It is a remarkable book, one which (as Rowan Williams is quoted as saying), is not easy reading, but in the end is uplifting and liberating.
In her mid-50s Claire Gilbert was diagnosed with myeloma. This is a cancerous condition of blood. However it has unusual features. She was told by her doctors she might have only months to live. On the other hand, given the vagaries of the disease she might live on for a decade or more. There was no way of telling. She was left in a limbo of medical and emotional uncertainty.
Of course she was put on a course of chemotherapy and other severe treatments.
“My cancer is incurable,” she writes, “so although the treatment has ‘worked’ and I am in remission, it could come back next year, or in twenty years’ time. I have no idea. So, I have to find my peace elsewhere than in having or not having cancer. I can’t think of fighting it: it isn’t going away.”
Behind Claire Gilbert lies a woven heritage of Jewish, Scottish, Spanish, Irish and English cultures. Her main inspiration in life seems to be the writings of St Julian of Norwich. Married to an Irishman, the couple divide their time between England and Ireland.
Revitalise
Claire Gilbert is the director of the Westminster Abbey Institute in London, which works with the public service institutions around Parliament Square “to revitalise moral and spiritual values in public life”. Wherever one lives and whatever one believes, this is a programme worthy of support which every vivid-minded citizen will support.
Remarkably her book has no bibliography, but a ‘Dear Readers Playlist’ – an aural feast of life-enchanting music of many kinds – an unusual feature I cannot recall ever having seen before in this category of book. It will give the book and her ideas a special relevance in the memories of her readers.
Her book is also very much a collective effort in another way. She arranged with a wide circle of varied friends to write about her feelings, ever changing as they were, as she passed through her treatments. The 44 letters are arranged in five parts leading down to her current Covid-19 self-isolation.
Incomplete
This is the kind of book which is incomplete, in the sense that it calls for the reader to think about how all this might apply to them. In a sense we are all aware of the course of life: death to this life is on its way. But the central question is not dying but living: how do we use the time we have to the best advantage of ourselves, of others, and of the planet. The book is not about dying but about learning to truly live.
Each one of us like Robert Frost are merely “stopping by woods on a snowy evening” too; and like the poet we are aware that though “the woods are lovely, dark and deep,” we have to move on before sleep: “I have promises to keep…”
Those promises should not be forgotten about; the time should not be frittered away. Let us hope that many readers will be influenced by Claire Gilbert’s book to concern themselves with living life to its very fullest.