It was fear of suffering before dying, and of, you know, lingering on, being in a hospital bed. And I hate hospitals, always have done. I think they're horrible places, even though I spent most of my life working in them. No, it's really - death itself holds no fears for me at all, as far as - I love the famous 18th century philosopher David Hume, who on his deathbed was asked, aren't you terribly worried about what will happen after death? And he said, no, I'm no more worried about not existing after death than I'm worried about not existing before I was born. And that is my view about death. I don't believe in an afterlife. But I know, as a doctor, that dying can be very unpleasant.

At first I - I felt that it was confined to my liver and that they had - the operation had completely removed it. And so I felt quite relieved. And then that same afternoon we had an MRI of my head and neck and it showed up that it was already in four places in my brain. So I would say that night and the next day, until I came back up to Emory, I just thought I had a few weeks left. But I was surprisingly at ease. You know, I've had a wonderful life. I've had thousands of friends and I've had an exciting and adventurous and gratifying existence. So I was surprisingly at ease, much more so than my wife was.

Missing a few months of feeling awful, being dead, versus not missing those months of feeling awful. Dead, at least theoretically, is the less painful of the two options, assuming that dead equals not being at all. Whatever terror there is lies in the present fear of dying, not so much of death. The stoics tell me that I’ve been ‘dead’ before, prior to my birth, and that was no hardship, was it? Back to Beckett, I think.

These matters have become discussable with one’s friends, not, of course, as a frequent part of gossip over lunch in the dining room (our only communal occasion) but from time to time, perhaps when admiring someone’s stoicism if their frailty is becoming painfully apparent, or feeling sad at someone else’s inability to accept what seems to be imminent. As a result of this openness, I think that most of the people here would consider it foolish to be frightened of being dead. All of us, however, feel some degree of anxiety about the process of dying.

Yes, but I don’t think I have the energy. I’ve been hit in the face by a cricket bat at 1,000 miles an hour. I think the last round-up is here. But that’s OK. It would be bad manners to complain. I’ve had a lucky life, and I’m grateful for it.

Yeah. These books are all around me and they'll be here when I go and I'm that sick. I just don't know when it ends. But in 2010, I got really ill and leukaemia was one of the things I was diagnosed with and eventually it will switch me off. So it raises the question: what do you do? Do you lie down and give up? Read the Bible? Or do you go on as you were reading and writing. And I've done the second and I've just done a little bit called Latest Readings which is about the books I've been reading lately and I could do another volume of that because I'm still reading.

It’s here. I’ve always thought that it was here. If you play to the gallery, that’s posterity. The best you can hope for is another gallery after you’ve gone, but you won’t see it. Statistically, it’s unlikely that much of what one does will be read for ever. It may just be one or two poems. For example, my Japanese Maple poem is famous among people who own a Japanese maple.

I think I actually wrote it in one of my poems is that my decline has been the making of me - I forget how I put it. Yeah, simply more reflective. I haven't got the excuse of moving forward just on impulse anymore, which I did, I think, for a long, long time.

What I’ve got doesn’t hurt. I’ve been lucky. The treatment has been benign. I don’t know if I could concentrate if I was in pain. I’ve never had to stop.

One thing, it's too big a subject and I want to talk about it on paper if I talk about it at all. But I can say this much, because I thought the life that my father and mother would have had together was cut short and something of what they might have achieved I hope that I'm achieving in my work.