Jonathan Riley-Smith was a distinguished historian, perhaps the most eminent contemporary historian of the Crusades, but of all his achievements, not the least was the way he died.
It wouldn’t be true to say of him that nothing in life became him like the leaving of it, but in the last three years of his life since being diagnosed with terminal cancer he put his mind to the business of dying in a way that was quite remarkable.
I had known him since I returned to Cambridge in the late 1990s to do a PhD and attended his seminar on the First Crusade, which was great fun. Indeed, I can thank him for my PhD in that he was one of my two examiners – and a cheerful, hospitable and interested one at that.
He was a great bear of a man: trenchant but enormously kind. And over the last few years I visited him when I was in Cambridge and liked him enormously. Every so often I would badger him by email about journalistic things, most recently for his reaction to the Pope’s response to the murder of the unfortunate French priest at the altar of his church; he was rather forthright about that and I duly quoted him in the piece I wrote. Sometimes what you need is the perspective of a medievalist.
He was entirely open about his condition, and so I had no compunction about badgering him to write about dying for the Evening Standard. Even though he was in a hospice at the time, he was terrifically reactive and productive and did what I wanted. He called his piece “A Letter from the Dying to the Dying”. It didn’t get into the Standard, though I had it in reserve, waiting for the perfect opportunity to put it in (let that be a lesson to us all).
But it did get published elsewhere after his death. And it also featured in the wonderful sermon at his Requiem Mass by Fr Alban McCoy, who had been with him a couple of hours before he died. That’s the first time I have ever commissioned from a writer material for his own funeral Mass. And as Fr Alban observed, in his 43 years as a priest he had never encountered anyone who was more internally composed and outwardly prepared for death.
What Jonathan wrote for me was absolutely characteristic of his practical sincerity: “If, like me, you are faced by terminal illness, be thankful you have not died suddenly. You may have been one of those who, in the belief that they would be spared suffering, wanted to pass away quickly and without warning. If so, you have been ignoring the effect that such an event would have had on your family, the chaos you would certainly have left behind, the burdensome and expensive work of tidying up that would have been imposed on others … Be glad, too, that the warning you have had will allow you to come to terms with your condition. You must try to be at peace. A good death can provide comfort to your family, but it needs a contribution from yourself.”
He practised what he preached. Some months before he died, I sent him a book I thought he might find interesting, about the Crusades. When I came to call on him I found that in fact the book had been written by someone who was hostile to Jonathan, not to say obsessed by him. But when I tentatively suggested that he might review it, he shook his head. “I’m thinking about how it’d play up there,” he said, pointing up at the ceiling. In other words, he wasn’t going to become involved in hostilities at a time when he was preparing himself for death.
And the great thing about his approach to death was that, once he had abandoned any thought of the future, he inhabited the present in a way we all should.
When I asked him about dying at the hospice, he said, interestingly, that religion hadn’t influenced his attitude to dying but that dying had influenced his attitude to religion. It had inculcated a sense of the importance of the present, which is, of course, exactly how we should be thinking when we imagine we have all the time in the world.
As Fr Alban said in his sermon, Jonathan comported himself in death as St Edmund of Abingdon recommended to his students: “Study as if you are going to live forever; behave as if you are going to die tomorrow.” And like the early martyrs, he regarded his death as his dies natalis: his birthday into life eternal.
Funnily enough, that was just my thought when I discovered that Jonathan had died on my own birthday, September 13. In a way, we ended up sharing a dies natalis.
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