Death of an Ordinary Man

Sarah Perry, a novelist, writes a memoir of her father-in-law David Perry's final weeks of life. The book moves from a portrait of David's character and history through the forty-eight days of his dying to the altered world his death left behind.

The memoir opens on a late-summer afternoon on Yarmouth seafront in England. Sarah, her husband Robert, and Robert's father David ate doughnuts and watched a fairy performer entertain a crowd. David, a patient and good-humored man of seventy-seven, ate four and declared the outing "excellent" (7). Sarah catalogues the particulars of his life: his fondness for weak Yorkshire tea, his lifelong stamp collection, and his love of sudoku puzzles and the Antiques Gazette. She argues that there are no ordinary lives and that every death ends an irreplaceable event. That evening, the three attended the circus at the Yarmouth Hippodrome, a venue David and Robert had visited during family holidays decades earlier, and David laughed with such expansive joy that his body shook the velvet seat.

Sarah recounts David's history through extended flashback. He was born in London at the end of World War II, moved to Basildon, Essex, at age ten, and married Robert's mother Jenny in 1970. Jenny had severe rheumatoid arthritis throughout their marriage, eventually requiring a wheelchair. She died after a chest infection went unnoticed for weeks. On her final day, she sent the family home with twenty pounds for a cab and blew them kisses by turning her head from side to side, her hands too damaged to reach her face. On the train home, Robert asked Sarah if she intended to write about Jenny's death. Sarah said yes, and Robert told her she should. During the pandemic, David moved to a bungalow near Robert and Sarah on the outskirts of Norwich.

After the circus, David drove home feeling unusually tired and spilled oats across his kitchen counter without the energy to clean them up. Nearly three weeks later, Sarah and Robert spotted David approaching through the Norwich market square and both felt an immediate certainty that he was dying. His gait was lurching, his skin had the dull look of putty, and his expression was grimly concentrated. At Robert's birthday tea, David could barely eat. Sarah fixes this afternoon as the beginning of David's dying, calculating that he lived for seventy-seven years and died for forty-eight days.

They persuaded the reluctant David to see his general practitioner (GP). A young doctor attributed his fatigue to long Covid, but Robert insisted on a blood test. David briefly rallied. Sarah prepared containers of rich, soft food, but David never ate any of it. Months later, Robert revealed he had eaten it all himself, unable to see an act of love wasted.

The blood test showed abnormalities. After a scan and endoscopy, a doctor told David the results looked like cancer. David absorbed this with resigned acceptance and went home to write his bank passwords and his mother's maiden name on the final page of his birthday calendar.

When the biopsy results came, Robert had just started a new job, so Sarah accompanied David to the hospital. Luther, the pastor at David's chapel, drove David there. In a small room, with a nurse present, a gastrointestinal consultant explained that the cancer had spread to David's bones and brain. Surgery was impossible, and David was not strong enough for chemotherapy. The consultant proposed fitting a stent to open David's oesophagus so he could eat, and David agreed. The consultant then clarified that they were discussing palliative care and that the priority was to keep David "safe" (53).

At Sarah and Robert's home afterward, David rallied enough to drink tea and talk. He told Sarah he knew he would die eventually but did not think it would be so soon. He mentioned money, saying there was more than enough, meaning not what he needed but what he would leave behind.

The next morning, Sarah found David at his bungalow lying across his bed, unable to raise his head. A GP came that evening to administer the ReSPECT form, a document recording end-of-life wishes. David chose comfort over prolonging life, elected to remain at home, and agreed to a Do Not Resuscitate order. Sarah and Robert moved into the bungalow, making a bed on the floor of David's stamp room.

A hospital bed was set up in the living room where David could see the garden. Sarah consulted her friend Sam, a doctor, who told her that David was dying not from starvation but from the cancer and advised against moving him for the stent. The senior nurse at the hospital agreed. Over the following days, hospice carers visited twice daily. David's body transformed: his stomach diminished, his skin became translucent, his skeleton emerged. A night carer named Emmanuel began watching over David so Sarah and Robert could sleep. During the nights, David cried out in distress, words of protest and bewilderment that Sarah describes as the single most distressing moment of the nine days.

Sarah's parents and friends brought food. The family settled into routines of nursing, singing hymns, and moistening David's lips. Sarah discovers that comfort and grief coexist without canceling each other out. On a Sunday evening, Luther held a last service at the bungalow. When the congregation sang "Great is Thy Faithfulness," David raised his arms above his head and sang with a powerful, certain voice, his expression one of relieved joy. Sarah interprets this not as submission but as resolve and confident faith. David was never lucid again.

Shortly afterward, David attempted to rise from the bed with startling strength, an episode the district nurse identified as terminal agitation. A syringe driver, a device delivering continuous morphine and tranquilizers, was fitted the following day. On the final day, a Tuesday, fine rain fell all morning. David's breathing took on the pattern known as Cheyne-Stokes respiration: sighing breaths followed by long pauses. The death rattle began. The atmosphere became strangely peaceful: lamplight, music, knitting needles, sighing dogs. That night, Sarah prayed for the first and only time during David's illness, her arms rising involuntarily as if holding David and offering him to God.

At three in the morning, Emmanuel knocked on their door and said, "David has died. He is dead" (174). Sarah and Robert went to the bed. David was warm. They kissed him. Emmanuel clasped his hands and said, "We love you. Rest in everlasting peace" (175). He bowed and left. Sarah and Robert opened the curtains: Orion passed overhead, Mars burned behind the winter-flowering almond. In the east, the late and inevitable morning began.

In the closing pages, Sarah reflects on how death transformed her perception of the world, making it simultaneously darker, more perilous, and more beautiful, an effect she compares to a Claude glass, a black convex mirror. Robert, now an orphan without siblings or children, told Sarah he felt he was ceasing to exist, fading out of a photograph. He explained that during those nine days he had been thinking about how to continue being a good son even after his father's death. David's funeral took place at an old Strict Baptist chapel, where Sarah read Psalm 103 and broke down. Sarah argues that dying, like being born, involves struggle, and that this should be comforting rather than frightening. She closes by imagining herself standing on a hill at night, watching lights come on and go out across a vast landscape, each light particular, never to be repeated or replaced.