David Hill on the kindest lie he’s ever been told.
Ethicists and philosophers divide over The Good Lie. Some claim that if an untruth prevents greater harm, supports social order and harmony, we’re justified in telling it. Others insist that truthfulness must always take precedence.
I agree with the first lot. Why? Meet my cousin Zona.
My father died half a century ago. It was Zona who told me the news, following it up with the kindest lie I’ve ever known.
Zona lived in the same town as Dad, 350km away. During his decade of widowerhood, Sunday lunch at her and husband Hughie’s place had become part of his routine.
Our phone rang mid-afternoon on one of those Sundays. The moment my cousin identified herself, I pretty much knew. People didn’t make toll calls in the mid-1970s unless something major was up.
“Is he dead?” I heard myself ask. Across the room, my wife Beth turned to stare. A pause at the other end of the phone. Zona was half a generation older than me; more reserved and discreet; hadn’t wanted to break the news so baldly. After a second, she said “Yes. Yes, he is. I’m sorry.”
My father hadn’t turned up to lunch. She rang, but no reply. She and Hughie drove to his place, found his car in the garage, the back door locked, bedroom curtains drawn. They knocked and called out, got the spare key from under its concrete slab, and went in. “He was still in bed. Just lying there. He looked very peaceful.”
I drove the 350km down, through the pre-Daylight Saving dusk and summer night. I felt… relieved. Grateful. My mother had died badly. Ever since, I’d worried about how Dad might go. Now it had happened in the best way possible, sudden and “very peaceful”.
I arrived at his house about 3am. The bed had been made. I stood looking at it, said “Cheers, Bob Hill,” slept on the living room floor, in the sleeping bag I’d brought along.
Zona was knocking on the back door when I struggled back into the world the next morning. “So he looked… all right?” I asked, as we drank instant coffee at the kitchen table, under the yellow ceiling patch where his roll-your-owns had painted a layer of nicotine. I wanted the reinforcement.
My cousin nodded, repeated the precious words “very peaceful”. Then she gave the mischievous grin I’d got to know and like. “Except he had his false teeth out.”
I guffawed. Everything was OK. It had been a wonderful death, instant and dignified. Well, as dignified as he could be without his dentures – and he’d have enjoyed that detail.
Things stayed just as OK over the next days. Beth and two-year-old Pete flew down, our son laughing with excitement as he told me all about the plane. The funeral was well attended: neighbours, rellies, workmates from the woolstore where my father had kept working part-time.
The logistics all lined up. I was the only child, and the will was straightforward. An excellent neighbour would like to buy the house for her son. The few things we wanted to keep fitted neatly into the car.
Zona insisted we had dinner at their place every night. We four adults talked easily while Pete played or fell asleep on the couch. At least once each evening, we agreed it had been a great way for my father to go. Peaceful, we said again. Dignified.
We called in to say goodbye as we began the long drive home. While Beth and Zona talked, I thanked Hughie once more. He was 15 or so years older than me, also, closer to Dad’s age.
“Just glad I was there when we found him,” Hughie said, almost absently. “Don’t think Zona could have managed by herself.”
I stared at him. ‘”What d’you mean?”
Hughie was gazing at the concrete. He hadn’t meant to come out with those words. “What –” I began again. He jerked his head at me; led me off towards his vege garden, away from the two women and Pete.
“What happened?” I demanded this time. Hughie was no good at dissembling. “Look… Zona didn’t want to upset you; said there was no point to it. But – your Dad was half on the floor, like he’d started to get up, couldn’t make it. And… I think he’d needed the lavatory. We had to clean him up a bit before we called the undertaker. Found a clean pair of pyjamas; put those on him.”
He shook his head. “Like I say, Zona reckoned there was no need to tell you all this. And whatever happened, it was quick. No doubt about that.”
So Zona hadn’t told me the truth, I thought, as we drove away. My father hadn’t died peacefully. There’d been discomfort, maybe distress. How long had it lasted? I’d never know. But I did know that my cousin had told me a lie.
As I say, philosophers differ over whether an untruth can ever be condoned. But AC Grayling puts it consummately: ”In the tumult and confusion of practical life, the truth is often damaging and painful… The concept of weighting enters. Yes, truth-telling is a very high good. So is kindness. It is sometimes unkind to tell a person the truth.”
We all know this; it’s a deceit that helps makes us human. Grayling quotes a precept from the Church of Scotland: “It is a sin to tell an untimely truth.”
If Zona had told me the facts of what happened to my father in his last moments, would that have been an untimely truth? Of course. A death should be allowed as much peace and dignity as possible. Plus, facts are not the same as truth; the latter is a far broader concept, encompassing beliefs, emotions, individual circumstances.
(A digression here to mention those bores who proclaim “I tell it like it is”. No you don’t, mate – because it’s nearly always a male who honks such stuff. You tell it as you think it is, so your version is nearly always incomplete and imperfect. Not to mention arrogant and tedious.)
My reaction to Hughie’s unintentional disclosure wasn’t what I expected. As we started those 350km back towards home, I felt an ache of love and empathy welling through me, for my father, but also for my cousin. She’d made such a moral, compassionate choice; in Grayling’s terms, she’d “weighted” the facts against the unproductive, the pointless damage and pain they would have caused if she’d disclosed the reality of his end.
I kept Hughie’s words to myself for years. When I heard Beth tell friends that my father’s death had been “the best possible way to go”, I said nothing.
Because on a lesser level, I’d made my own weighting decision. What benefit, what good in the moral sense would there be in my telling anyone? I didn’t say anything to Zona; my question about benefit applies there, too. It was only when my cousin died, a few years back, that I shared the facts of Dad’s death with Beth. By then they were subsumed in the greater, grateful picture we’d built of his life and the parts he’d played in ours.
I still unreservedly approve of Zona’s deception: her flawless choice, the kindness and love that motivated her. It was an act of unqualified virtue – and that’s no lie.
