Voices from beyond
We had more or less forgotten the Kursk, the Russian nuclear submarine that sank with all hands in August. For a week then it had dominated the headlines, the world held spellbound by the idea that men were dying before our very eyes, tapping out desperate messages that could not be answered. The botched rescue attempts ended, the crew were declared dead, interest waned.
What really drove the story off the front pages was the assurance from President Putin that the 118 submariners had died almost instantaneously, drowning as the vessel foundered in the icy waters of the Barents sea. It was a tragedy, but a recognisable one: ships sink, men die. Death is ordinary; it is the process of dying that is not.
But Putin’s assurances were misplaced. The discovery yesterday of a note in the pocket of an officer aboard the Kursk suggests that some of the crew did survive for several hours after the vessel sank, perhaps longer. “It is 13.15. All personnel from sections six, seven and eight have moved to section nine,” wrote Lieutenant-Captain Dmitri Kolesnikov. “There are 23 of us here. We have made this decision because none of us can escape.”
The words are matter of fact, almost banal: no heroics, no hysteria. On one side of the single sheet of paper, he gives a factual account of the sinking; on the other side, increasingly illegibly as the light fades, he bids farewell to his wife, Olga. “I’m writing blind,” says Kolesnikov. There are some figures, but it is unclear what they mean. We are reading blind. But we are reading, and the words are riveting because our darkest imaginings back in August were correct: some men survived and were confronted with the imminence and inevitability of their own deaths. Brutus, preferring honour, may have been able to look at death with indifference, but we cannot, not when the veil is lifted as it is here. Now we will remember the Kursk forever.
Death in the past has usually been mediated. We could rarely be witnesses to the last moments of the living. Most last words sound as if someone else minted them later to confirm that a person died as he lived. From George V’s “Bugger Bognor” and PT Barnum’s “How were the receipts today in Madison Square Garden?” to Thomas à Becket’s “I am ready to die for my Lord”, we are being assured that the famous died without anxiety, and most of all that they died in character. Dying is made to seem like the logical conclusion to living: a drawing down of the curtain on a play we have understood.
Gladiators, we were told, would salute Caesar before embracing death; churchmen like Becket would willingly go to their rest; fictional heroes such as Sidney Carton would happily sacrifice themselves. Death was not something to be feared. The elaborate statuary of Victorian cemeteries is a celebration of death. By contrast, our dull headstones – their size and shape dictated by stringent regulations to allow for lawnmowers – reflect a desire to forget it. We fear death, but have to confront it as never before. This is the first age in which death is not mediated. The dying can make us feel the reality of their final moments, and we can hear the emptiness of the ocean.
We have had messages from the dying before, but they have usually been heroic narratives which reinforced the notion of a worthy death. One of the most striking is the diary of Captain Scott, who kept a detailed record of his ill-fated mission to the South Pole in 1912.“There was a blizzard blowing in the morning when Oates said ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’ and he stumbled out of the tent. We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman.”
The idea of a gentleman’s death animates both the diary and the letters Scott wrote as he lay dying. To his wife Kathleen, he wrote: “I want you to take the whole thing very sensibly, as I am sure you will. You know I cherish no sentimental rubbish about remarriage. When the right man comes to help you in life you ought to be your happy self again. I wasn’t a very good husband, but I hope I shall be a good memory.”
Scott’s carefully wrought final thoughts are very different from Lieutenant-Captain Kolesnikov’s scribbled message. Scott offers us consolation; Kolesnikov none. Scott had reached the conclusion of a struggle in which he had ultimately been defeated; he has much he wishes to say (including instructions on how his son was to be educated). Kolesnikov is passing the time awaiting death, struggling to see in near darkness.
Increasingly we are allowed to witness that final wait: to experience not Scott-like heroism but the banality, pathos or sheer terror of the moment. Technological change has given us unprecedented access to the process of dying. Kolesnikov’s final thoughts were, like Scott’s, recorded on paper, but we can only read them thanks to modern salvage equipment. Black boxes record the final words of pilots as their planes plunge into the abyss. Mobile phones and satellite technology mean there is now no place on earth where people are out of reach. Internet links and webcams make it possible to share your life with a worldwide audience. Or, if you wish, your death. The dying, by accident or by design, are now public property.
In 1996, Timothy Leary orchestrated his dying in a manner wholly appropriate to the modern age which, in the 60s, he had helped to define. Diagnosed as having terminal cancer, he allowed web users to share his final days via his home page. “Why not? Why not? Why not?” were his final words to the thousands attending the internet vigil.
Leary also committed his final testament to film, in The Enthusiastic Death of Timothy Leary. Again he was being prescient: though we frequently sanitise death and talk about it euphemistically, we are increasingly willing to film it. In 1998, as part of the series The Human Body, the BBC controversially filmed the last eight months of a man dying of inoperable abdominal cancer in what it said was an effort to break down the great taboo.
Leary chose a public death, but he was perhaps bowing to the inevitable. In an age of TV surveillance and mobile communication, few deaths can be private. The photograph of the terrifying final moments of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durrah, the Palestinian boy shot in Gaza earlier this month, became the defining image of the renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We are inured to photographs of the dead, but we cannot deal with a small child cowering with his father in the dust, about to die. As with Kolesnikov, at once we feel the living presence and mourn its unnecessary passing.
Days later, that conflict threw up another horrific image: the Palestinian luxuriating in the blood of the Israeli soldiers he had helped batter to death. A lynching on prime-time TV. The killings in Ramallah had one other terrible twist, though the details of the story are disputed. When they discovered their husbands had fallen into the hands of Palestinians, the wives of the two soldiers had attempted to reach them on their mobile phones. Hani Avrahami’s frantic calls were reportedly met by an unfamiliar voice, who told her: “I have just killed your husband.”
Even on top of Everest, it is no longer possible to die privately. In 1996, as New Zealander Rob Hall lay dying of exposure 200 metres from the summit, he used his radio telephone to call his pregnant wife in New Zealand. He told her he was dying and they calmly discussed possible names for their unborn child. If a film-maker were to invent such a scenario, he would be laughed out of Hollywood.
Everything now is recorded, including death. The fact of James Bulger’s murder was horrific, but what made it overpowering was that grainy image of a tiny child being led from a shopping centre, hand in hand with his two killers. Again, the agony lies in seeing the moments before the tragedy, when it might have been averted. It is no longer possible to be impassive: we are the impotent observers of a pointless death; we are implicated.
If death isn’t seen, it seems, it is heard. This week jurors at Reading crown court were played a recording of a telephone call which six-year-old Zeshan Zaidi made to the emergency services while his father was allegedly stabbing his mother and sister. Shortly after the call was made, Zeshan was murdered. The emotional impact on those who heard the call is unimaginable.
More and more we are used to hearing the final words of the dying, usually pilots struggling to save their aircraft. Their words have to be subjected to close textual analysis. As Egyptair flight 990 began its plunge into Nantucket Sound a year ago, co-pilot Gamil El Batouty could be heard intoning: “I rely on God, I rely on God, I rely on God.” Was he inviting the end, or praying to God for help in averting catastrophe?
The plane crash is the modern way of death: slick, detached and public. When the golfer Payne Stewart’s Learjet criss-crossed the US last year with Stewart, his three companions and the two pilots dead on board and the plane flying on autopilot, the nation watched on TV. For four hours it flew across the country, with an impromptu escort of airforce fighters, before running out of fuel and spiralling into a field in South Dakota. This time there was no note, no word: a sudden loss of cabin pressure had almost certainly rendered all six unconscious within seconds.
Death, having once been heroic, has become surreal: America’s favourite golfer suspended in space in his private plane as his adoring fans prayed for him will suffice as its defining modern image. We no longer look for logic or meaning in death, nor do we have the words to express our emotions. As Ian Hamilton pointed out last year in an essay on black-box recordings, even as the end nears pilots rarely depart from the colourless operational language of flying.
Yet at such moments, as Hamilton recognised, even jargon has immense power. In the face of death, perhaps all are heroes, however unheroic the age. Unlike Scott, Dmitri Kolesnikov was not seeking to die a good death. But in doing his duty and then saying farewell to his wife, he did precisely that.
← Joy for the jester
Life's great game →
