Waiting for the Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death

"I have an absolute and utter crush on Richard Holloway and he knows it. I call him my ‘delicious bishop’. He is one of the most beautiful people that I’ve ever met, inside and out. His mind is just the kindest and sharpest. He is a real academic who questions and doesn’t accept. His time as the Bishop of Edinburgh was really interesting because he was a challenge for some people but, for me, he is just an incredible one-in-a-lifetime person. At the recent Saltire Literary Awards, Waiting for the Last Bus was up. I sat in the audience thinking, ‘Please, please, let it be Richard’. And it wasn’t. It was mine. I felt so disappointed that my book was chosen over Waiting for the Last Bus . That sounds terribly sycophantic, but it’s not. When I stood up to give the acceptance speech, I said we need to remember that books affect different people in different ways. I’ve been so touched by so many people who have said such nice things about my own book, but I have to say the book that affected me most in this year was his. Richard is in his eighties and knows that he is waiting for his last bus. In a way that only he can do, he is mixing that dialogue of what he thinks and rationalises in his own mind with what he reads and has learnt about in his academic, prosaic world back into his beliefs and his religion. They aren’t necessarily the beliefs and religion of a specific church, but of humanity in general. It is a small book that is enormous in terms of its reach. It makes you think at levels you didn’t think you had the ability to have some opinion about. It also opens up doors that you didn’t even know were there. As only Richard can, he gets you on the very last paragraph or so of his final windup when he says ‘I’ve just lost my last dog’. It’s about saying he now knows he is ticking off on his list the things that he knows he will never do again. “It is a small book that is enormous in terms of its reach. It makes you think at levels you didn’t think you had the ability to have some opinion about.” To have somebody who is such an inspiration in a mode of acceptance, knowing what he now will and won’t do, is such a calming influence and an example to us all to be able to say, ‘Let me get to his age and give me the wisdom to be able to know what’s important in my life and what isn’t. And grant me the time, the peace, and the silence to just think before I die’. We spend so much time doing and don’t spend enough time thinking. Richard Holloway reminds us how important thinking is to humanity. Absolutely, I don’t think it’s morbid at all. It’s about Richard saying here are all the things that I’ve learnt, and I’ve done. He’s processing them and analysing them and deciding what he thinks is actually important. I think it is very life-affirming. But he’s doing in it in the mirror reflection of knowing what it is that’s coming behind him. That’s what makes it very poignant. It’s not the fripperies of what we think as being important in life—this is the car I drive; this is the latest accolade I’ve got—or anything like that, it’s right down to those absolute raw core human characteristics of what matters in this really short existence that we’ve got on this planet. Often, we don’t realise that until we’re already at the eleventh hour. He’s just incredible. He lives and breathes what he believes and what he stands for. I think it’s a book for all ages. The trouble is that it does tend to become a book for those who are thinking they are in the dying process. But as you’ve said so beautifully, it’s partly an instructional manual that says: I’ve got to the end of my life, here’s what I think is important, folks. If you know this at the beginning of your life, maybe you’ll take a slightly different part and get more out of this life than you would have done otherwise. Yes, I do. Absolutely. We are a little bit obsessed as a society—certainly as a western society—with saying ‘I need to live longer.’ I would like to live ten years longer than my life expectancy suggests but I don’t want it when I’m eighty; I wanted it when I was twenty. Living ten years longer when I’m eighty, into my nineties, may not be what I consider to be a quality of life. Trying to postpone death and making life last longer isn’t the same thing as living life better and living life for the moment. We do worry about living longer rather than living better—and we should be living better. I’m not sure I could pick one. There are so many that, at that moment, actually feel right. There is a poem that we used to use in the memorial service which was about death: “So Many Different Lengths Of Time” by Brian Patten. It is beautiful because it talks about people living for as long as you hold them in your heart. One of the most important people in my life was my grandmother. She’s not dead because she’s still inside my heart and she’s still inside my head. For me, she dies when I die. That is a perfect circle for me. That poem reminds me every single time that we don’t actually have to let the people we love go because they do stay with us because they have impacted us—in our lives, in our hearts, and in our memory."