One grey January Monday morning 6 years ago my phone rang. It was my friend Julian Bolt calling. He told me he was in hospital with stomach problems and could I be there when the doctors gave him the results of some tests?
I was busy that day and already feeling pressured but of course the answer was yes.
Hospitals scare me. I spent some of the darkest moments of my life in them when I was younger. When I arrived at Julian’s ward, he explained how he had had stomach pains over Christmas and ended up being rushed into hospital where they discovered he had an ulcer. They had got the ulcer under control but were doing other tests to check it out.
Just outside the ward I could see a couple of doctors chatting and smiling. One of them was sitting on the desk next to a monitor that showed a cross-section scan of someone’s abdomen.
A doctor and another member of the medical team arrived and took us into a small room to explain the test results. I started recording the meeting on my phone so we didn’t miss any important information.
The doctor’s words will stay in my mind forever. She said, “When we discovered the ulcer we told you there is a possibility of cancer. I’m afraid it’s not good news. You do have a cancerous mass in your stomach. And the scan today shows that it has spread to your liver.”
After some time to process this, she added “This is not something you are going to be cured of”
I’d never heard someone be told they were going to die before.
The doctors left to give us some time alone. Julian, ever philosophical, stared at the floor and mused aloud, “How to live life in a shortened period of time…”
My contribution was less philosophical and embarrasses me to recall: “Well that’s shit.”
I took Julian back to his ward and we talked for a while. I held back my tears. I didn’t think it would be helpful for me to be more upset than he was. Julian had a freelance job lined up and he asked me to call the company and tell them he wouldn’t be able to do it. So I called a man I didn’t know and told him Julian was ill and wouldn’t be able to do the work. The man wished Julian better.
After a while, I went outside to phone some friends. And to let myself cry.
A strange thought hit me later that day when I remembered what had happened in that small consultation room: “This is as good as it gets”. At some point in our lives, most of us will be sitting in a small room with a doctor saying some version of “This is it”. That is, if we’re lucky; if we get to know in advance.
Julian’s 49th birthday was a few weeks later. A few days ahead I found myself standing in a card shop wondering “What card do you buy for someone’s last ever birthday?”
Over the next few months, Julian was about as unlucky as he could be with the final months of his life. He reacted badly to the chemotherapy that might have given him more time with his wife and children (just enough chemo to get sick and lose all his hair but not enough to do any good). He suffered pain with blood clots collecting in his legs and got an infection during a procedure that could have helped him.
Just as he was looking a little brighter he suffered a stroke and lost his speech.
But he was lucky in a different respect. From the moment he was diagnosed until the moment he took his last breath, he was accompanied by friends, family, neighbours who loved him. Towards the end, people took it in turns with his wife, Sonia, to stay with him overnight, so that Sonia could be with the children and also get some sleep. Buddhist friends of Julian visited him often and over time helped him to find acceptance and even gratitude.
I know Julian from a men’s group we had both been members of for 10 years. One of our regular meetings fell 2 days after his stroke when we knew he didn’t have much time left. Jerry who leads the group made a spontaneous decision and texted us all – ‘meeting tonight is at the hospital’.
We collected in Julian’s room. Jerry suggested we hold hands in a circle with Julian at the top still lying in his bed. Julian looked at each of us in turn silently. Then Jerry talked about how this was Julian’s last time in the men’s group and that therefore “This is the last time this group will meet in this form. Because when one person leaves, the group is never exactly the same group again.”
One of the group members (also called Julian) who is a Christian, said a prayer. “Thank you Lord for Julian’s life…” I was struck by the language of prayer – rather than us talking to Julian or talking to each other, a prayer addresses another entity, a third party, and offers up thanks and heartfelt wishes in a way that isn’t possible in any other form.
Then we all retired to the waiting room and one by one, reentered the room to have time alone with Julian to say our goodbyes. I was nervous when it came to my turn and I walked in to Julian’s room. I sat next to him and looked at him, Julian looked back with his intense eyes, still unable to speak. I apologised that I hadn’t seen him as much as I could; I should have cancelled my trip to Australia that fell in the middle of his illness. Julian got angry, he threw two pieces of paper with the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’ (that someone had written to help him communicate) off his bed. Then he looked back at me. Why was he angry? I guess because here I was with a few minutes left to connect with Julian for the last time and I’m making some dumb apology.
I suspect that this is a universal experience for anyone who tries to be with a person who is dying: whatever we do, it never seems like enough, we think we could always have done more. And yet for every one of us there is a limit to what we can do, and how intimate and connected we can be.
Later that week I drove to Devon to visit my parents for Easter and on Easter Sunday I received the phone call from Jerry to say Julian had died.
On the day of the funeral, I was a pall-bearer. Outside the church at the moment the wicker coffin was lifted onto our shoulders, I was momentarily shocked to think “Julian is in here, right next to me”. I felt self-conscious being shorter than most of the pall-bearers so that the coffin leaned forward. But it wasn’t heavy; Julian was so thin by the time he died.
After the ceremony, Jerry and Ben, another member of the men’s group, performed Eddie Vedder’s song Rise on guitar and mandolin. It still makes me cry to listen to it today.
At the time, Julian’s death seemed tortuously slow. Now, looking back, it seems as sudden as a car crash. Julian was special and I feel resentful that I will never see him again.
Julian was 49, never smoked, didn’t drink much and ate home-cooked vegetarian food every day. As I get into my 50s I am aware that longevity involves a good dose of luck. It feels as if I and everyone I know are walking across a minefield, and every so often a friend steps on a mine. At first the mines are rare and far apart but as we walk on they become more and more numerous. Yes there are things we can do to improve our odds but some of it is just chance. And ultimately, no one gets out alive.
I wrote about Julian in Screw Work Let’s Play. I describe him as, “a great photographer but prone to getting blocked”. That was understating it. Julian was a seer. He could see things no one else could see.
He attended my 40th birthday celebrations at a cottage in the countryside. On the Sunday morning he and I went for a walk in the grounds. We stopped and looked at a pond surrounded by trees. It was a typical English grey November day and the pond looked grubby with leaves floating in it. But Julian was staring at it, constructing a photograph in his mind, despite not having his camera with him. I looked at him and realised that Julian was not seeing the same scene I was. I saw a muddy pond and he saw something else. We weren’t living in the same world.
But Julian was also a seer in other ways. In the men’s group he could look into your soul and see what you didn’t want others to see, perhaps didn’t want to see yourself. When he called you on your bullshit it was a powerful experience.
Julian would go for weeks and months without taking photos. And he was in a job (as a photoshop touch up artist) that he didn’t enjoy. I tried everything to help him create more of his art, every creativity exercise and trick I know. In the end, exasperated, I said to him “Can you not just take some bloody photos?” Julian would go back and forth wanting to escape his job and yet need the money from it to support his family. Eventually he seemed to go quiet and stop struggling.
In retrospect, he should have just quit.
I wish Julian had taken more photos, held more exhibitions, found more fulfilling work. But when we looked we found he had left quite an oeuvre. We held an exhibition of his work later that year (in the home of Ed, another men’s group member) and managed to sell some pieces. Julian had also invented something I had never seen before – the house portrait; a way of photographing the details and forgotten corners of someone’s homes that captures the residents’ personality and soul. I wish he could have continued making art.
A few days after the funeral I was at Julian and Sonia’s house talking to their two young children. The 3 year old boy looked at my shaved head and out of nowhere said “You have hair but it’s very short”
And I said “Yes that’s right”.
“If you have no hair then it means you’re going to die but if you have some hair you’re OK.”
Shocked at the young boy’s realisation, I simply said “That’s right”
“So you’re OK. You’re not going to die”
“Yes” I said, resisting a strong urge to cross my fingers.
~
Julian Bolt 1963-2012
Julian (centre) with Chris (left) and Ed (right) from the men’s group
[All photos by Julian, except top photo of Julian taken by me at my 40th birthday and wide angle lens shot taken by Jay Versluis. The square images are from Julian’s ‘Five elements’ series]