But no more shocking than some of the other calculated, rule-bending risks the Blair government has already taken in the quest for peace. The refusal to be hung up on demands for prior decommisioning of IRA arms, Blair's willingness to meet Gerry Adams when circumstances require it, the return of Adams himself to the talks on Monday after the briefest of exclusions in response to two IRA murders, perhaps the non-extradition of Roisin McAliskey, certainly Mo Mowlam's own meeting with paramilitaries at the Maze itself, are all examples of what John Major didn't - and given his perilously slender Commons majority - probably couldn't, allow in his own dogged search for peace. Yet I am writing about it now because I saw it; and that, these days, is unusual I have no desire to see anyone else die before my eyes. I may or may not watch the controversial programme in question but I want the right to.To look at death makes us realise us that every death is a private and individual act, whether there are witnesses present or not. With the dying, seeing may not necessarily be believing - the common reaction to a corpse is always that they look exactly the same as before, yet there is something imperceptibly different. Yet, to understand the difference between death and life, sometimes one has to see it Hiding death away does not cheat it. It deceives us into feeling that we might live for ever, rather than live as well as we can while we have the chance..
IN NORMAL times, or what passes for them in Northern Ireland, the depiction on BBC Radio by a prison officer of the frighteningly aberrant regime at the Maze might have created more of a sensation than it did. Even so, the problems of imposing order on a system which has claimed the lives of 29 prison officers in 25 years would be as daunting for this government as it was for the last. I didn't sell pictures of her dying to flog jumpers, as Bennetton did with their notorious picture of a man dying of Aids. I didn't use it to make multi-media art, as artists such as Bill Viola have done. I didn't publish pictures of it to end some kind of political injustice, like great photographers such as Don McCullin have done I have exploited her death only by writing about it. Why, I thought, can't she have any great philosophical insights about dying? She had only the one: that she wasn't ready to go.So I imagine her death was fairly average because death is fairly average.
There was Derek Jarman confronting in his art the shutting down of his body And there was me and my Mum still having the same old rows. "Why can't you just smarten yourself up?", she yelled while she lay with tubes coming out of every part of her body. Successful pain management is supposedly available to NHS patients but I'm sorry to say I never saw it.Once we reached the hospice not only was the pain controlled but the visibility of death, of what was actually happening, was present. Everyone had their own room and as much privacy as they wanted, yet the humanity and honesty of the staff meant that death was not simply a failure of medicine but the inevitable end of an intimate journey.
