God had bequeathed him the standard three-score-years-and-ten but at the tender age of sixty he had multiple illnesses, any one of which would have dispatched a lesser man a decade earlier. He had overcome chronic alcoholism at forty, after that addiction had ruined his fifty-man, sorry, person, Lincoln's Inn law practice, ruined his central London gymnasiums, ruined his family lives (Martin had several families) and ruined his health.
To become a champion weightlifter by the time he started at Manchester University, Martin had trained hard from the age of fifteen and dined on body-building proteins and compounds, which, even in those unconscious and innocent days, were suspected to bugger up your heart, liver, kidneys, nervous system and other vital organs; as indeed they did. In his fifties, after a stint of working for Slumberger in Texas, then moving to Brussels, Martin hurried home to England for a heart-bypass operation. It wasn't one of the major bypasses. I had a sporting friend who boasted a quadruple by-pass - which left little of his original heart intact, but beating - and didn't President Bill Clinton survive a triple? Martin's was by comparison mere tinkering. But it foreshadowed his mortality. We brothers knew with certainty that we were blessed with immortality, with infinite lives in perfect health. Father had had intensive medical check-ups every half-year that always announced him to be in tip-top condition - right up to the moment of his surprising death, sprinting for a train. His five sons naturally and unthinkingly cleaved to that immortal tradition for most of their lives.
The first, merest indication that Martin's health was less than perfect, a sign of weakness, was him needing reading glasses. We brothers should have guessed then that he was destined to decline like an ordinary humble person. His heroic victory over alcohol, when he often defended clients in Court, having imbibed a bottle of whisky and five pints of bitter, without the slightest sign of inebriation, was followed by a sinister tremor in his limbs. Over a decade this slight tremor developed into full-blown Parkinson's Disease, which in his last years, without medication, would twist his entire upper body, neck and head, distorting his face into a dreadful grimace - before lapsing into "Stillness" a paralyzed state. At best, heavily medicated, the Parkinson's caused him to stagger when he walked. Still a big man, with a deeply cynical disposition and a wicked way with words delivering ego-piercing, unforgivable insults; still looking like an angry heavyweight boxer you would cross the street to avoid, Martin decided that God had a good sense of humour. Having for years escaped undetected as a serial drunkard in London's central courts - under the sharp, beady eyes of other lawyers and judges, now as a seasoned AA Helper - sober as a judge for twenty years - when he walked along a train, bus, platform or pavement he staggered. Gentlefolk scattered as he approached, with loud stage-whispers fearing and accusing him of being drunk.
The Parkinson's was the worst of his conditions - and the most disabling.
But, in addition to the weakened, bypassed heart, and the insidious escalating Parkinson's, As the icing on his vengeful God's cake, Martin also developed prostate cancer. This rather mild, unseen deterioration; of which medics reassure patients "Nobody dies of prostate cancer, they die with it. Not of it" most upset Martin. It made him incontinent. He wanted to pee and couldn't always control it. At this stage, between sixty and dying aged sixty-six, though he had many friends locally and globally, he lived alone in a town-centre flat. He couldn't drive. Bus and train journeys needed careful planning and were exhausting. His leisure, entertainment, shopping and medical appointments were all local - on foot; moving as slowly as the Parkinson's dictated. If needing a lavatory, he couldn't sprint to one - or quickly pop into a bar or restaurant - in time. His greatest fear was peeing in his pants in public. So he isolated himself in his home. Treatments offered for the cancer included drugs or scalpels that would reduce his manhood - fill him with oestrogen and make him effeminate. One of Martin's businesses had been in the anti-terrorist world; working with ex-Marines, mercenaries, bodyguards, GBH criminals (Grievous-Bodily-Harm), and the like - who could "kill with one blow". Real tough guys. The idea of chemical castration and embracing his "feminine-side" was intolerable; utterly insupportable. He would not and did not do it.
In his modest 17th century apartment in a pedestrianized area above a nail-bar and beauty parlour; in the middle of his living room Martin suspended a heavyweight boxer's punch bag. I tried it a couple of times. I hit it, it didn't move and the tough canvas skinned my office-honed knuckles. I avoided it thereafter. But Martin, after his medication, pummeled away at the dead weight, with the vigour and moves of a professional. The bag suffered serious assault. He was a tough guy. He would die a tough guy.
The medication was fearful. He had one of those plastic trays with boxes for each half-day. In each compartment were five or six pills - of many colours and sizes. All he had to do was to remember to swallow them - and remember that he had remembered. Taking a double dose of these powerful drugs was not recommended. It was around this time that we started to discuss religion and the next world - and to reminisce. It was also about this time that Martin started to hallucinate. He confided in me, on one of my monthly or so visits, that in his living room - with us, were three men. He knew that I couldn't see them, but they were there; and they were made of paper. Not papier-mache but made of random sheets of paper that fill an office waste-bin. When he went to bed, they moved into his bedroom. One-day when I visited, Martin wasn't there. After some anxious hours I tracked him to a rural rest-home, where one of his doctors had sent him for a break. Martin's paper-men were with him - he told me. Then he pointed to the ridge tiles of the next building and asked if I could see the line of Russian Hussars, riding along the ridge of the roof. That was a few minutes before he attempted to leave his room, which had a wide and wide open door, a door that he couldn't find. I strongly suggested that he throw his medicines away. Which he did.
Within two weeks, Martin was as clever, cutting and as obnoxious, cynical and deeply insulting as ever. He had got his mind back. He reverted to correcting my English and providing me with accurate quotes from his wide range of literature, utilizing his photographic memory. In a lifetime of business Martin never had an address book - he remembered them all.
What had caused the halluciantions is that his medical advisers kept moving jobs. He didn't have a doctor - he was blessed or cursed with a "medical team". When one or another of his symptoms threatened his life, Martin would stagger to the doctor's surgery, the Health-Centre or the local hospital, and whoever it was on duty would pile another pill onto his plastic tray - write a prescription to the chemist - and see him stagger off home; out of their hair. Nobody took responsibility for balanced medication. He was subject to the equivalent of what, in mental hospitals, was once called The Liquid Cosh. As long as he went away and kept quiet, "they" had done their duty. After that week of the Russian Hussars, his eldest daughter took charge of the medical prescriptions, drove up from London, sat with A Doctor until the drugs were rationalized - extracted promises of consultation and reviews, and Martin thereafter had a far better patient's life.
By that time, 2011 to 2013, our other three brothers had died. Our parents were long gone, so I was the last male member, driving a hundred odd miles to visit. Our sister Stephanie, lived nearer, in the Pennine Hills above Manchester, but her visits were limited by work and transport. She was a dedicated religious person, thoroughly schooled in Bible Studies. Like Martin she had a powerful memory and often quoted appropriate passages from the holy book, in an attempt to lead Martin to God and Salvation, before he died. Uncharacteristically, Martin nodded polite assent to her barrage of good intentions. But he moved no closer to God, the Angels, The Heavenly Saints or any Holy Prophets. He remained, as we all were, a lapsed Catholic, and in his case an avowed Atheist and Humanist. He and I discussed psychiatry, psychotherapy and philosophy - as far as my limited repertoire allowed. And we focused on our shared, mostly unhappy and troubled childhood. We agreed that our sessions be limited to a few hours as neither of us could bear the emotional strain of being together for longer. We both needed a few weeks to recover from our encounters. Our family didn't do closeness; or friendship; and definitely not brotherly love. We six siblings had been driven apart from birth - and in our adult lives had met only once - at The Cat & Fiddle pub, atop the bleak treeless moorland between Buxton and Macclesfield, in the Pennines. Hence, Martin and I agreed, our strange family culture had driven the curse of alcoholism and our innate underlying social paranoia and churlishness.
So, rejecting religion, as he approached his last weeks, Martin had no God to comfort him - or to fear.
His six grown-up children and two of his four ex-wives rallied round and found him a place in a hospice; for which he was grateful. He had learned some manners in sixty-six years. Being a wandering peripatetic parent, he was little known to his nearest and dearest - and so it was that as he fell into a coma and was obviously in his last hours, as I left his bedside and his six children gathered round him, Martin's Number-Two daughter came charging along the corridor, triumphantly towing a fresh-faced, innocent priest who clutched a new Bible and wore an optimistic and suitably religious expression, as he hurried to give the Last Rites. It mattered little that the cleric was from the wrong religion - the enthusiastic daughter had found him somewhere in the hospice, looking clean, eager, Godly and presumably Christian - but I knew at a glance that the man was not Catholic, and that he was new at the job. I guessed that this Vicar of Christ had read and understood a small fraction of Martin's digested knowledge of comparative religions - and I realized that if Martin was to waken as this black-garbed usher-into-the-next-world prayed over him and sprinkled him with Holy Water, he was in grave danger (forgive the pun) of Martin responding to his ministrations with a vitriolic, biting, comic comment that might destroy the man's faith - forever.
I watched from some distance down the corridor as the priest bent over brother Martin, amidst the family; and with relief I saw, praise the Lord, that Martin did not open his eyes or his mouth.
At his funeral on 14th May 2013, Martin had the last word and underlined his own beliefs. As we left the chapel, the funeral service played the Monty Python song, loaded with Martin's ironic humour, denying God and Eternity: "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life."
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