# 46
Another season, another month, another change in the weather… another day, another hour… and then, a week ago, another funeral. Sadly, my brother-in-law, Stephen Goldberg, has died. Another lifetime is at an end, another’s life is over. Stephen was my age, we were both born in 1947 and he was the elder by only a month. His passing is another reminder, which I didn’t need, of my own mortality.
We were born into another time, another place, another world. It was a monochrome world where men wore hats, women shopped with ration books in their hands. Most people took a bath only once a week and for every household Monday was wash-day. As I remember it, the streets were largely without cars, the houses without warmth and there was no television. We seem to have spent our lifetimes getting away from that world. And now it is long gone, but so too is Stephen.
Over the years, he became a genuine life force - which makes it all the more difficult to believe we will never see him again. Until his last handful of days, he was very energetic, very determined, impossible to ignore. At times he could simply be impossible but, looking back, we wouldn’t have wanted him any other way. He was a great original. An iconoclast, an innovator and an inventor, he never took ‘no’ for an answer. He never marched in step with the rest of the world but maybe, like McMurphy[1], he simply heard a different drum. When he invested in property it now seems unsurprising that his portfolio should at one time have included a haunted hotel. When he bought a villa in Portugal
In time, most of those who knew him developed the habit of saying “Think Stephen Goldberg…” Confronted by a problem, someone might ask – ‘What would Stephen Goldberg do in this situation?’ We knew, of course, that imagining Stephen’s advice was not necessarily going to produce the best or wisest solution, but it would certainly get you thinking – and thinking differently…
Martin Amis has been out and about very much this week, eager to press the case for his new book. I caught him three times; Tuesday morning on Radio 4’s Today, Wednesday afternoon on Radio 5 Live and then interviewed by Sarfraz Manzoor on The Guardian’s website[2]. On each occasion he mentioned mourning the death of his friend Christopher Hitchens and described how that loss has affected his own engagement with life and awareness of his own mortality. Amis suggests that Hitchens’ own love of life has now passed to him and resulted in a compulsion to embrace every moment with renewed vigour. I wish that I had thought to say the same about Stephen when I spoke at his funeral.
When you get past sixty years of age you realise, as Amis puts it, “Now this can’t turn out well…” Life looks precious again, as it did when we were children. And now, at the age of sixty-five, cancer has ended the life and times of Stephen Harold Goldberg. Living is what we do. Living is what Stephen did as well and for as long as he could. Life is all we’ve got. It’s what we cling to, night and day. We speak, casually, of a lifetime as if it were continuous, endless even. But it isn’t. Death makes every lifetime finite; and without life there is no time.
Death is not ‘time out’, death is the end of time, and the end of life as even Spock knew it[3]. Life is what we know and we know nothing without it. Without it there is not even any tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow[4] in which to catalogue our regrets. And yet we comfort ourselves by saying, “Life goes on.” As indeed it does until the day when our past, our present and our future all stop. Then, for each of us, there will be no more present and therefore also no more time. Goodbye, Stephen. If only you could know now how much, and by how many, you are missed.
[1] Alvin, one of the junior medical staff in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest suggests to Nurse Ratched that McMurphy may not be truly mentally ill, only that he “hears another drum.” Kesey is quoting from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”
[3] “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it…” Words misattributed to Spock in the 1987 song Star Trekkin’.
[4] Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays etc etc
Macbeth. (Act V, Scene V).
Look it up, why don’t you?
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