Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[TEXT ON SCREEN

Introduction]

KEVIN

I’m Kevin. I’m 69 years old. And four months ago, I learned that I had incurable cancer.

INTERVIEWER

What sort of cancer?

KEVIN

It’s prostate cancer, which has spread to my bones.

[TEXT ON SCREEN

Background]

I believed I was indestructible. I think a lot of men do. I look in the mirror, and I see 18. And I think, why is my hair not brown? It must be the light that’s wrong. So I did have that male sense of I’m going to go on forever. Yeah, I did. Yeah.

My first wife died of cancer at the age of 49. But I only had a vague expectation that I would die one day. And what this gives you is clarity about that. Real clarity.

My wife was with me, and we wanted to know roughly how long we could expect that I would live. Because it’s so important, it felt at the time, and it’s right-- to know how long you have helps you develop the game plan for coping with it. If I had a three month diagnosis, I think I would be absolutely focused on the final stage, how I wanted to die, where I wanted to die, and those things I had to get sorted before that point arose. Whereas if you have more time than that, you will think about those things, but you will also have more time to enjoy the days that you have.

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Coping Mechanisms – Being Positive]

The first choice is that there is no point to being angry. There’s no point in being disappointed. What we’ve decided to do, talking about it, is we’re going to live each day as best as we can, take each day as a gift, and say, what can we do today. And not big things-- little things. Go for walks, enjoy getting a bird table, as we have, and watching the birds come. Doing things each day, and at the end of the day, say, hey, that was great, wasn’t it?

INTERVIEWER

Do you manage to laugh a lot?

KEVIN

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You have to laugh at yourself. You have to laugh at the vanities. You know I’ve got a chemo haircut now. I used to comb my hair very carefully, and I’ve given up on that.

You have to laugh at yourself and the situation, is find humour, because humour is warm, and humour feeds on yourself. What you, what I don’t want is any bitter, there is no room, there should be no room, for bitterness. Now, I’m saying that as a 69-year-old. And I do know if I was 19, I may feel differently. But I am not bitter about where I am. I’m grateful.

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Coping Mechanisms – Project Management]

If you said to me, did I want this project, I can think of other ones I’d rather have than project managing my own death. But the truth is, we all have, we’re all going to die. And I think we forget that in our lives, that every life ends. And to have the chance to organise and do things and make productive use of the time that’s left is a real, real privilege. And I’m grateful for that chance.

For somebody whose dad drop dead at 64, who went out the door to go down to the doctors to get a test result and he dropped dead in the high street, so my mother was never able to say goodbye, it’s a huge privilege to know that we’ve actually got some time. We don’t know how much time, but we’ve got some time to still enjoy things together, to put our lives as much where we want them to be as possible. It’s a real opportunity to live the rest of my life as positively as possible.

[TEXT ON SCREEN

Lifestyle]

You read all the stuff about diet, and I know that I could become a green tea-drinking vegan, and that might give me a little while longer. But I don’t want to change what I eat and what I drink and what we have fundamentally, because it’s part of who we are. And it’s part of the pleasure we take from everyday life.

So we might – I’m trying to eat a little less chocolate. And I’m trying not to eat blue cheese. And those other things which, at the margins, may make a difference. But the things that have got me to 69, there’s no point in junking them now in case it gave me another two months, because it’s given me the 69 years I’ve had. And that includes a glass of wine.

[LAUGHING]

INTERVIEWER

Good for you.

[TEXT ON SCREEN

Relationships – Wife]

KEVIN

I am on a journey. I’m hugely lucky I’ve got a supportive wife who’s on the journey with me for as long as she can be. But there’ll come a point where our destinations diverge, because I’m going to die and she’s not. And she’s going to have a life beyond. And I see my duty as her husband is to help her approach that new life as positively as she can.

I’ve organised a kind of a list of things that over the years I’ve done rather than she’s done. There’s a Word document of all of the things that I need to share with Jenny, and we’ve been through nearly all of them. So there won’t be anything that she’ll ever have to say, how did Kevin do that. And that gives me great comfort, because it means that I’m loving her till the last possible moment.

[TEXT ON SCREEN

Intensity]

When we both worked full time, essentially you worked in the week and you lived for the weekend. What we now do is we make every day matter. Since the diagnosis four months ago, we’ve actually had some of the best times of our life. And we’ve talked about it. We’ve said what a great day today was. We’ve never felt closer.

There’s an intensity about your life when you know it’s a finite one that you just, I guess, take for granted when you think you might live forever. If you’d said to me, would a dying person feel a new intensity, depending on my age, I probably would have found that unimaginable. I’d thought they’d have been sad and down and angry.

But that is not how I’m feeling. And I know it helps I’m 69, but even so, the gift of life is somehow reinforced when suddenly you’re reminded it’s finite.