Over the last few weeks, I've been getting up close to death.
I've travelled from convention halls in Las Vegas to death cafes in Exeter
on a mission to understand mortality.
I've always been terrified of dying and that anxiety
was the reason this series began.
But the people I've met have helped me start to see it differently.
In this final episode there's one more perspective I want to hear.
I'm meeting someone who is facing death much sooner
than he expected.
Today I meeting a guy called Joe, and Joe is only a little bit older than me,
he's 34 and he's been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
I'm looking forward to meeting him.
I've often imagined what it must be like
to be diagnosed with a terminal illness when you're young.
But I've never actually spoken to anyone that that's happened to
and so yeah, it's going to be interesting.
Hello! – Hello!
Doctors told Joe he had one year to live.
Yes, please.
Almost two years ago.
So that is a table full of drugs.
What kind of cancer were you diagnosed with?
And they told you that you had a year?
After you've kind of been given a prognosis like that
and all of this information, what do you do you next?
How do you actually deal with that in your mind?
Joe comes to St Christopher's hospice every week.
It's a space away from the medical
where they're helping him reckon with the big question that his illness has brought up.
Hey! – Hey Joe, hello.
What are the things that have been most difficult to come to terms with?
Joe's diagnosis has forced him to face a new reality.
He takes me to the place he came to wrestle with the idea that he was dying.
So have you been coming up here for a long time?
Why is it difficult to process?
Is having this diagnosis of being ill what you would have imagined it's like?
Because people imagine it would be …
The worst thing in the world.
I'm really interested in the kind of, good bits …
Yeah, I'm also somebody who's imagined that moment a lot and imagined it being horrible.
How about how people around you have dealt with it?
Hi I'm Leah. – Hi, nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
How did you two meet?
And we've been married for three and a half years.
Yeah, six months before the diagnosis.
… in case I would run away.
How has this kind of changed what you guys were planning for?
So a year after Joe's initial diagnosis, we found out that the cancer had spread
and we stood on London Bridge and he gave me a hug and said:
'I'm really sorry, I thought … I was really looking forward to us getting old together.'
And I will always remember it, yeah, and
I think because Joe's … we're both young and when life is cut short in that way,
it's not just the life that you're losing, it's the future of that person,
which is one of the things that I find very hard to think about.
I take each day as it comes.
I take each hour, sometimes even just the next five minutes,
to see what happens and try not to think too much about
what's going to happen then because we just don't know.
Now that Joe's aware of how precious his time is
he's surrounding himself with the people he loves whenever he can.
Joe is one of the first people I met at uni at freshers' week, so …
Yeah, we've been firm friends ever since.
That's a rubbish superpower to have.
Sneezing and losing time.
Quite a rare thing, is Joe in water.
Yeah, I don't do water. – You don't do water?
We went on a holiday before and he couldn't swim
and we encouraged him, as friends do, to jump off a bridge into the water
because the rest of us had, it was only when he started floating off we realise how serious he was.
Yeah, it was pretty stupid.
Do you remember Gladiators?
Yes!
So this was us playing hang tough on the Circle line.
This is us at the theatre.
Oh and that's the Canterbury beer festival. There's a theme emerging, isn't there?
That was a good day.
How did you guys both react when you heard that Joe had cancer?
I still haven't taken it in.
In terms of accepting that there's a finality to this, you know?
I think I'm still working on that, to be fair.
We all kind of live in a bubble where we think we're indestructible until something
like this happens.
Has it given you any new sort of perspectives?
You become aware of time, it's not an infinite resource.
Definitely throws things at a sharper relief doesn't it?
That we are grateful for …
When bad things happen it brings people together.
Yeah!
I think rude perspective about the randomness of life.
I think it was maybe something I haven't quite appreciated before.
Before we started this series, I would have thought that a situation like Joe's
would be almost impossible to deal with but the people that I've met over the
last few weeks have made me see it differently.
I've been surprised over and over again by how people can be faced
with their own death, something that's inconceivably scary, and just kind of deal with it.
That doesn't mean that it isn't frightening and that it isn't very sad
but I think we often do find we have the resources to cope.
It might be through friends, it might be through spirituality,
it might be through being practical or just accepting it
but I think that people are often more resilient than they might have expected.
It's actually genuinely got better and I don't think
I necessarily expected that.
I think that when you have death anxiety, often one of the things that you can get stuck on
is the fact that you can't know when and how you're gonna die and you can't control it.
And I think that doing this has made me understand that that lack of control
can rather than being a source of anxiety, actually be a relief.
So this was the last episode.
But next week, we're going to do a quick recap of the series.
I'm going to have a look through the feedback and respond to some
of the comments that you guys have left.
So, see you next week!