There was an outwardly unspectacular pub in Oxford, just off the High Street, that was rendered miraculous by the almost constant presence of a tall, tousle-haired student in the year above me: Simon “Bob” Boas. Bob was a figure of legend: garrulous, generous, with a huge smile. I felt I’d dreamed him into life, so perfectly did he – quoting poetry, holding forth on adventures at home and abroad – fit my sense of what university life ought to be like.
Bob left without finishing his degree, but he occupied a large space in my mind and we kept in vague, parasocial touch until earlier this year when I read in a Jersey Evening Post article, sent to me by a mutual friend, that Bob was dying.
His three columns describing his descent from diagnosis to death struck an extraordinary chord with readers far beyond the island he called home. What seemed to explain the viral success of those articles was the equanimity with which he, aged 46, approached his end.
Bob crammed a lot into that short life: his career as an aid worker took him from Bosnia to Palestine, Nepal to Sierra Leone. “I have dined with lords and billionaires,” he writes, “and broken bread with the poorest people on earth. I have accomplished prodigious feats of drinking… I have been a Samaritan and a policeman, and got off an attempted murder charge in Vietnam (trumped up, to extract a bribe) by singing karaoke in a brothel.” His life was rich and brilliant, his love for his wife, Aurelie, a thing of tender and enduring beauty – and then, quite suddenly, he was gone.
This book, he tells us, was almost called Muscadet and Morphine, because they were the things that got him through those painful final months. Bob was surprised at the response to his columns – and that surprise energises this short, remarkable book on how to die well.
It begins with the three columns he wrote and then expands upon the ideas that he was able to form and jot down in the time between being diagnosed with advanced throat cancer (in September 2023) and dying of it this July, aged 47.
Reading A Beginner’s Guide to Dying you’re struck repeatedly by the terrible juxtaposition of the rush of erudition from this fantastically bright mind still thrumming with life and wit, and the silence of the end, which is so near. Bob tells us that he conceived of the book as “fragments I have shored against my own ruin”, quoting TS Eliot. There are wonderful vignettes, beautiful meditations on faith and friendship, advice for the dying and those around them. It ends with the eulogy given by Bob’s best friend from university, James, which, like the rest of the book, had me laughing and sobbing all at once. It’s going to come for all of us, death, and I hope I’ll have this extraordinary title by my side when my turn comes.
• A Beginner’s Guide to Dying by Simon Boas is published by Swift Press (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
