“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

That is the opening to Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas. A poem about death, or rather, resisting it. In it, Dylan admonishes us not to give in to death, but to fight it fiercely and relentlessly. He urges us to refuse the quiet surrender that often accompanies the end. But this piece isn’t about Dylan’s poem. It is about something far more common and far less dramatic, how we approach death when it’s no longer an option to fight. It is about John. 

I had a good friend called John, as in John Doe. I’m using a placeholder name out of respect for him and his story. But those of you familiar with him will know this was written in memory of him. I met John on Twitter, a random encounter that didn’t mean much. We followed each other for whatever reason. Over time, as is the case with most online friendships, we started interacting often and eventually became more familiar. We met outside the internet a number of times. We played games, talked about things I can’t quite remember now, and he would sometimes explain peculiarities of the constitution to me, which he loved doing as a lawyer. He even sent me a grammar book when I first decided to start writing. Those moments felt ordinary then in the way everyday interactions often are. But they carry a different weight now, precisely because of how easily they’ve slipped into fragments. This is the sum of my relationship with John over the 5 years that I knew him. 

One day he called me and told me he had come around to see a radiologist for a routine scan. At least that’s what he told me at the time. You see, John had wrestled with cancer at a far younger age, and won. At the time, I didn’t bother to find out what type of cancer it was, all that really mattered was that he had won that battle. A few days after our last talk, John again called to inform me that he was having difficulty swallowing food. We really didn’t think much of it, as it was attributed to him mistakenly ingesting some caustic medication; medication he used for dressing a wound he had sustained. I reassured him about it, we caught up and ended the call. The day after that, I visited him in the hospital. A few days later, I received news of John’s demise. 

There is a kind of silence that follows death, especially one that isn’t anticipated. When I first heard the news, I called John twice, as if he would be on the other end to greet me with a “You hear sey I die, eh?”. But there was none of that, the phone rang twice and then there was quiet. Dylan Thomas urges to fight and rage against the fading of the light. It’s a beautiful idea, a compelling one even, and sometimes I wish I were with John in his last minutes to sell him this idea. But sitting here now, writing this piece, I find myself asking, “What if someone is too tired to fight?”  We are quick to encourage strength. “Things will get better.” “Stay strong.” These words sound supportive, and most often they are, but they also assume that the person on the receiving end has something left to give. I may not have known John much, but anytime he recounted his initial battle with cancer, he always made it clear how much he hated all the hours of chemotherapy, and going from one religious establishment to another. It seemed as though death back then would have been a much better fate than the ordeal that he had to face. 

How then could I, in good faith, offer strength to someone who had already climbed mountains I would not even dare climb in my imagination?

So yeah, I like to believe that in his dying moments, John slipped peacefully into the night. He didn’t go raging and fighting against it like Dylan Thomas would have wanted. 

Or maybe he raged against death in his own way. In the little moments with his friends, in the banter of the group chat, the sporadic calls he would make to check on me, the games we played together. Maybe John didn’t have to put up a fight against death because he had spent every moment of his life doing exactly that. If death is indeed the antithesis to life, then it tracks that every moment we spend awake, breathing, hoping, playing and loving is in itself an act of resistance. 

Perhaps I misunderstood what Dylan Thomas meant by rage. 

I imagined it as a final stand. A dramatic confrontation at the end of existence. But maybe the rage against the dying of the light is not reserved for the end. Maybe it is found in the mundane and the ordinary. 

In building a connection with a random person from the internet. 

In recommending a grammar book for a friend who is about to start a blog.

In making plans with friends when you’re not entirely sure that you’ll be there. 

If that is what raging against the dying of the light means, then John fought harder than most. 

And if there is any lesson buried within all of this, it is that perhaps we should be slower to judge the dead by their final acts and quicker to honour them by the lives they managed to live before it. Because some people rage against the dying of the light for decades. And by the time the light finally goes out, they have already fought more battles than the rest of us will ever know.