An affecting chronicle of a man’s death—and his life

David was an unassuming sort of fellow. He lived on the outskirts of an English city in “a bungalow in a suburb full of bungalows”. He spent his summers at the same seaside town, which offered “pleasure without surprise”. He had an appreciation of beautiful things—decorative tablecloths, handmade shoes—but wore the same tatty hat and smeared glasses. He was often too embarrassed to show emotion, in the typical British way.

What was unusual was the manner of his death. His end, when it came, was swift: David died only nine days after doctors diagnosed him with oesophageal cancer. (He was 77, a couple of years younger than the British average.) In “Death of an Ordinary Man” Sarah Perry chronicles those nine days.

Ms Perry is the author of acclaimed novels including “The Essex Serpent” and “Enlightenment”; she is also David’s daughter-in-law. She combines a novelist’s attention to detail with a relative’s affection. She had once thought of death as “a moment of termination”: “I imagined that I’d live, then I would die, my death a brief stop at the end of my sentence.” As she cares for David, however, she comes to realise that within death are events “as various and strange as those of a life”.

She watches as the cancer transforms David, curving his legs into wishbones, changing his skin to “greyish putty”. The experience also transforms Ms Perry. She surprises herself by being a natural carer, never balking at “the disintegrations of a body preparing itself for the grave”.

Science—a theme of her fiction—helps her to make sense of things. Death is at once ordinary and odd, “these things not cancelling each other out as they ought to have done, but persisting in undiminished quantities, like a failure of simple maths.” Just as objects accelerate as they fall, so David plummets towards death. The process follows near-universal patterns. The refusal of food, the large quantities of urine, the desiccated lips: all are ordinary for the dying. Why then, asks Ms Perry, does nobody ever bother to explain them?

David gets to die at home, not “alone on a ward under unkind lights”. There is paperwork to be signed to fit a syringe driver (which can deliver continuous doses of morphine) and to authorise the use of the morphine. There are prescriptions to treat “terminal agitation” (when a patient becomes restless and startlingly strong). And there are nurses who come to “ease suffering in a moment, and then quietly leave”. When the “death watch” comes, Ms Perry and her husband, with the clumsy faith of lapsed Baptists, have no rituals with which to fill it.

Her book’s purpose is to shine a light on what is hidden. At times the reader is left wondering how a shy man who wanted “no flowers, no mourning” would feel about being the subject of such a book. Yet any qualms do not last long, for in “Death of an Ordinary Man” Ms Perry has produced a thoughtful meditation on death in the 21st century and a humane tribute to a loved one. In her telling, the life of an unassuming man assumes great meaning. ■