We need to talk about dying

Essex Serpent author Sarah Perry has written an extraordinary new memoir recounting her father-in-law's 48-day death from cancer. As she is honoured at the Nero Book Awards, she reveals why she believes it's her most useful work yet

- By Matt Nixson

David Perry, above, resting a cup of tea on his tummy the day his cancer was diagnosed; below, with son Rob

IN the late summer of 2022, novelist Sarah Perry stood on the sun-kissed seafront at Great Yarmouth with her husband Rob and father-in-law David enjoying piping hot doughnuts fresh from a kiosk. Later, they visited the Hippodrome Circus for the last day of its famed summer spectacular, howling with pleasure at the clowns and marvelling as the mechanical stage submerged.

So far, so ordinary; a quintessentially English day out by the sea. But as Perry, the acclaimed author of The Essex Serpent, reveals in her impossibly moving new work of nonfiction Death of an Ordinary Man, it marked the beginning of the end for David, a 77-year-old former industrial chemist with a love of Antiques Gazette, stamp collecting and handmade shoes.

“It was his last day out — which we had no way of knowing at the time,” she recalls.

“He was already very, very close to death, but there was no sign. He ate fish and chips and doughnuts and had candy floss and he laughed his head off.”

That sign came three weeks later as Sarah and Rob waited to meet David, a widower, for tea at Norwich’s historic Jarrolds department store and the writer was struck by a strange, disturbing premonition.

“I like to think of myself as being very rational and driven by data, logic, and reason,” she continues. “And that was the most almost supernatural, atavistic, witch-like moment of my entire life, because I had no experience of people with cancer, no experience before that of people fatally ill.

“But I took one look at David and knew he was dying. He was walking towards us, through the crowd, and really all I was seeing was a man who was tired, but a voice in my head went, ‘That’s a dead man’ - it was extraordinary.”