Michael Rosen is one of the most beloved writers in the country, with countless children’s books and adult books and collections of poetry that can take readers through their entire lives.
What he has also written about – with his customary grace and humour - are taboo, difficult topics which people tend to avoid during those lives: illness and death. And these topics are at the centre of his new show at the Old Vic on 19 October, called Getting Through It.
“In the first half, I talk about my son Eddie, unfolding the way in which he died at 18 and some of the ways in which I've tried to cope with it,” he says, “So it's about an event which I was devastated by, and how I've had to cope and recover from it. And then the second half is how I got COVID and was put in a coma for 40 days, and the wonderful way in which the nurses kept a diary when I was in the coma, and how I’ve coped with that since.
The two sort of merge at the end, where I look at these two ways of recovering.”
What is crucial about the show at the Old Vic, is knowing how these kind of major life events never leave you. Rather, it’s a case of making sense of them, and to continually do so.
Rosen says, “COVID is five years ago, and my son died in 1999, but they’re very much with you. It’s like a shadow that walks around with you every day. Partly it’s because I’m talking about them but also they’re there if I’m sitting on a train.
Some people get PTSD after being in intensive care, so I’m quite lucky in that respect. And maybe that’s partly because I talk and write about it rather than dwell on it. It’s that pressure cooker thesis, where if you bolt it down and try and contain it in a small part of your brain, it bursts.”
And indeed, this is where we have the benefit for audiences and readers of Rosen’s work, which can act as a release valve, a cathartic means of making sense what will happen to us all at some point. Few perhaps have the tragedy of dealing with their son’s death at such a young age, but in one form or another, there’s always going to be illness and death to deal with.
Rosen says, “I'm telling this story partly in the hope that if you hear me telling it, you'll want to tell your story and it'll help you. That's how I open the show.”
In terms of grief, the way he puts it is that it never leaves you but, “what you have to do is find some way to make that grief safe, because first of all, the grief feels dangerous. You’re in a state where you feel the grief can smother you.”
He says grief can leaves you helpless and hopeless, “you stop doing things,” but that you can find a way to make it recede, “like the tide going out…if it can recede, the grief can be safe, but it doesn’t go away, not at all.”
Eddie died from meningitis, and one of the first ways that he began to cope was to try to understand what is is: “I wanted to know as much as doctors do about meningitis, so that I could at least place the death in context. One way I have found peace is to see us as walking around with bacteria in us all the time. Sometimes they are helping, like in our gut, and other times the bacteria could harm us.
Putting his death in the ordinary context of medicine and pathology helped me a lot. It still does.”
In this manner he says to expect a lot of science in the show, with the first half being about bacteria and the second half about a virus. It may sound simple to render it in such prosaic terms but it’s entirely useful and indeed necessary. Rosen says he’s talked to many people who simply don’t want to know how a death has happened, the exact circumstances. Whereas he wanted to know everything and write how sepsis takes place when you have meningitis, and found comfort in that. And unexpectedly, it brought him comfort during his close brush with Covid.
“Just before I was put under for the coma, the doctor said to me, ‘Will you sign a piece of paper that will allow us to put you to sleep?’
And I said, ‘Will I wake up?’
The doctor said, ‘You've got a 50/50 chance.’
I said, ‘And if I don't sign?’
And he said, ‘Zero’.
I signed straight away, of course, but as I tell the story in the show, I reflect that I had a split second in which I thought of what the doctor said about Eddie. Which was that as he went off to sleep, he wouldn't have known that he was dying. The way it works with the meningitis bacterium is that if it gets into the bloodstream, the way the doctor put it was that, the bacteria multiplies very quickly, produces antigens, and inside your body turns to mush. I remember saying, ‘Well, would you have known about that?’ And he said, ‘No, he wouldn't have known anything at all.’
I remember thinking the same thing at that very moment, 16 years later. As he said it was 50/50, I thought, ‘Well, at least I won't know, and that'll be like Eddie.’ So fine, go ahead inject me.”
Listening to Rosen is to marvel at the humanity he is able to tap into here, a will to explore difficult aspects of life which then later bring such rewards of connection and comfort.
It’s a wonder he’s here at all to tell us about it, given how close he came to never waking up again. “My oxygen saturation level was 58 and its supposed to be 95+. The doctor said, I’ve never seen anyone conscious with that sat level… you’re right on the verge of going because your body’s shutting down at that point.”
This was in March 2020, as the country was going into lockdown. At that stage there was no going to your GP, no going into A&E, and the paramedics on the phone told him to sit tight because he seemed to be breathing fine. This was when scores of people were dying at home. It was only when his wife said that, “the shadow of death had crossed my face,” that she called a GP friend who heard his oximeter reading and demanded he be taken to hospital immediately.
After waking up from the coma he was writing in his head immediately – the children’s book Rigatoni the Pasta Cat was the end result, and he says, “I was longing for hummus, so I turned that into the story about this cat longing for pasta, because nobody could bring in hummus because of the restrictions” - and the second half of the show consists of a mix of poems and writings but also his patient diary, where the voices of the doctors and nurses come in.
Patient diaries are a common practice, documents which can help fill in the gaps when coma patients emerge on the other side. Rosen says, “Some people come out of that situation very disturbed, partly because of the drugs they give you, people do have hallucinations, and the diaries can provide some sense of what actually happened to you.”
Again, all of this will be delivered with plenty of humour – “At one point, I say, ‘Spoiler alert: I lived’” – and he says it is a hopeful show more than anything. When he performs, he often meets people who have lost somebody or who are in recovery. He talks about his recent book Good Days, which posits that, “One of the ways we have to find hope and happiness is to make peace with death.
And the way you make peace with death is to find out how people deal with it. In traditional communities, death is at the heart of communities. If you go to a French village, the cemetery is in the middle and people go there every weekend. If someone dies, most of the people turn out. It may be religious, it may not be, but people have a way in which it's part of life. Yet the way we lead our sort of urban modern lives, where funerals tidy people away, means you can very easily live without death. So when it happens, it's in some respects more of a shock.
I think with this show I'm doing the French village thing.”
To him, there is a false perception that if you think about death too much, then you can’t operate, when he believes the opposite is true. “M view is that by having talked and written about it and put it in my life, it's actually enabled me to do all these other things that have absolutely nothing at all to do with it. So although this show is about that, I'm busy doing hundreds of other things, performing funny poems for children, doing radio broadcasts about language and teaching my students, things nothing to do with the death and the illness.
I sometimes think that by having made my peace with these things and turned them over and thought about them, it's given me the freedom to deal with them, so I'm not beset and weighed down. It’s a bit of a paradox isn’t it?”
It is, but an inspiring one. You feel that Rosen is in some way teaching us how to live better. Without it turning into some kind of smug self-help fodder. It’s simply about experience, and wisdom, and passing on that wisdom. It is of great use for the secular, religion doesn’t come into it. He says it’s spiritual only in the sense that it’s to do with feelings – “your spirit in that sense” – and believes death in material terms is the end of consciousness. But what’s been remarkable to him, is learning, “Eddie lives on… with all the people that knew him.”
In Good Days, Rosen gets in touch with Eddie’s old best mate, Greg, and after meeting up, this Greg tells him that Eddie kept a joke book. He wrote down jokes and told them, and wanted to be a comedian. People can now buy that book.
“All this time, Eddie’s been living with this chap Greg. Greg would tell people, ‘Here’s an Eddie Rosen joke.’ So I don’t believe in the supernatural but I do believe Eddie lives on, do you see?”
The show at the Old Vic will be another chance for Eddie to live on through others. He used to play in goal for the Arsenal community hockey team, members of which will be attending the show.
“Every year they play an Eddie Rosen Memorial hockey game. I go every time and it’s amazing. It’s so moving that they hold it, and Freddie Hudson who’s the head will be there with his family. He gives a speech each time. They loved Eddie and they now all have kids of their own. I’ll be lucky to get through that bit of the show without crying. But it’s wonderful.”
Michael Rosen: Getting Through It, is at the Old Vic on 19 October.
