Excerpt from Do No Harm by Henry Marsh, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Each day I thought might be the last but each morning when I returned she would say to me, 'I'm still here.'

Once when I told her, as I kissed her goodnight, that I would see her in the morning, she replied with a smile,

'Dead or alive.'

My family were playing out an age­old scene that I suppose is rarely seen now in the modern world, where we die in impersonal hospitals or hospices, cared for by caring professionals, whose caring expressions (just like mine at work) will disappear off their faces as soon as they turn away, like the smiles of hotel receptionists.

Dying is rarely easy, whatever we might wish to think.


Our bodies will not let us off the hook of life without a struggle. You don't just speak a few meaningful last words to your tearful family and then breathe your last. If you don't die violently, choking or coughing, or in a coma, you must gradually be worn away, the flesh shrivelling off your bones, your skin and eyes turning deep yellow if your liver is failing, your voice weakening, until, near the end, you haven't even the strength to open your eyes, and you lie motionless on your death bed, the only movement your gasping breath. Gradually you become unrecognizable – at least you lose all the details that made your face characteristically your own, and the contours of your face are worn away down to the anonymous outlines of your underlying skull. You now look like the many old people, with drawn and dehydrated faces, identical in their hospital gowns, to whose bedside I would be summoned in the early hours when I worked as a junior doctor, down the long and empty hospital corridors, to certify death. Your face becomes that of Everyman, close to death, a face we all know, if only from the funeral art of Christian churches.

By the time she died my mother was no longer recognizable. I last saw her on the morning of the day she died before I set off to work. I had spent the night in my parents' house, sleeping on the floor of my father's study, near my parents' bedroom. I could hear her rasping breath through the open doors between the study where I was lying and her bedroom. When I went to see her at four in the morning she shook her head when I asked her if she wanted some water and morphine, even though one would have thought from her appearance that she was already dead, had it not been for her laboured, occasional breathing. Before I finally left I said to her, to her death mask, as I held her hand, 'You're still here.' Almost imperceptibly she slowly nodded her head. I cannot remember my last sight of her when I went to work


in the morning – it no long mattered. I had said goodbye to her many times already.

My sister rang me shortly after midday, as I sat at some dull medical meeting, to say she had died a few minutes earlier. Her breathing, she told me, had become shallower and shallower until eventually my family, who were gathered round her bed realized, with slight surprise, that she had died.

I felt no need to pay her body my final respects – as far as I was concerned her body had become a meaningless shell. I say 'body' – I could just as well talk of her brain. As I had sat by her bedside I had often thought of that – of how the millions upon millions of nerve cells, and their near­infinite connections that formed her brain, her very self, were struggling and fading. I remember her on that last morning, just before I went to work – her face sunken and wasted, unable to move, unable to talk, unable to open her eyes – yet when I asked her if she wanted any water to drink she shook her head. Within this dying, ruined body, invaded by cancer cells, 'she' was still there, even though she was now refusing even water, and clearly anxious not to prolong her dying any longer. And now all those brain cells are dead – and my mother – who in a sense was the complex electrochemical interaction of all these millions of neurons – is no more. In neuroscience it is called 'the binding problem' – the extraordinary fact, which nobody can even begin to explain, that mere brute matter can give rise to consciousness and sensation. I had such a strong sensation, as she lay dying, that some deeper, 'real' person was still there behind the death mask.

Excerpted from Do No Harm by Henry Marsh. Copyright © 2015 by Henry Marsh. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.