Photo: Cover of 'A Beginner’s Guide to Dying' by Simon Boas.
A Beginner’s Guide to Dying
By Simon Boas
This incredibly rich 141-page book of gratitude, humour, and robust vitality, was written in the year after its author, Simon ‘Bob’ Boas, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died in July at the age of forty-seven.
Who was Simon Boas? He was an adventurous Englishman who left Oxford University before graduation and pursued a humanitarian career. He recounts a remarkable life in an inimitable, humorous style. He spent his last years on Jersey, where he continued to pursue voluntary service. His cheerful perspective, and practical action in the face of death, is inspiring.
A review in The Guardian by someone who knew him from his university days says it well: ‘Bob crammed a lot into that short life: his career as an aid worker took him from Bosnia to Palestine, Nepal to Sierra Leone. “I have dined with lords and billionaires,” he writes, “and broken bread with the poorest people on earth. I have accomplished prodigious feats of drinking… I have been a Samaritan and a policeman, and got off an attempted murder charge in Vietnam (trumped up, to extract a bribe) by singing karaoke in a brothel.” His life was rich and brilliant, his love for his wife, Aurelie, a thing of tender and enduring beauty – and then, quite suddenly, he was gone.’
‘Simon was a talented human being.’
There are short chapters on a wide range of topics including ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Interacting with the Dying’, but it was lines in a chapter on gratitude that moved me the most: ‘It is rightly very popular these days to keep a journal of the things one is grateful for every day, and this has huge power to help us realise how good life really is. But I’ve also found that contemplating two much bigger truths has helped me really realise how enormously lucky I am right now and how lucky I always have been, notwithstanding even the fact that I am dying at age 46. These are, first: how fortunate we are to exist at all; and second: how lucky we are to exist when and how we do… I think, whether you believe in divine creation or solely in physics (though the two are really not incompatible), there can be no dispute about how fortuitous it is that we are here today as free, conscious entities, able to think and experience and love.’
Doing voluntary service for the most successful humanitarian movement in my lifetime, Médecins Sans Frontières, I can identify with that sense of how fortunate and privileged we are in our part of the world. I know now that I have lived longer and better than most of the humans in the 300,000-year history of our species.
Simon was a talented human being who lived a robust, positive and caring life, spreading goodwill far and wide in daily encounters. A portion of the royalties from his book will go to palliative care charities. Would that I leave such a legacy through my daily choices and actions while I am still alive.
Comments
living life to the full is something for us all to aim at, and working with voluntary bodies, like MSF, is a good way to do that. But I have a worry - aka a concern - that the CEO of this and other charities has a much higher rate of pay than the other people working with the charities. It’s sad there always seems to be this kind of downside to good works. Peter Varney
By Peter V on 6th December 2024 - 8:48
Regarding pay at MSF U.K. and elsewhere, please see: https://msf.org.uk/how-we-spend-your-money
As a former international corporate Human Resources executive specializing for three decades in what people get paid, I have become aware of abuses in executive pay in some charities over the years, but never in MSF. I have voting rights in elections of trustees who set MSF executive pay. That is due to my continuing volunteer service over the past fifteen years for MSF headquarters in Brussels, the largest in the world-wide MSF system.
By Daniel Flynn on 6th December 2024 - 10:11
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