Today, we watched death unfold before our eyes.

The class sat in hushed silence as the elderly man in the video spoke calmly of the cancer in his body. The mass of malignant cells that somehow chose to defy millions of years of innate biological programming and mysteriously rebel against the rest of the body that gives it sustenance. This is civil war at its most intimate and there is no United Nations to bungle through a hastily-arranged acutely-mismanaged peace process - there is no peace process for the afflictions that wrack the body from within. Just pure unadulterated pain. Return fire with fire. Fight poison with poison. Go for a life-threatening operation that might just snuff out the candlelight of life, undergo multiple sessions of chemotherapy that progressively melt the body down to irradiated biomass, or cross your fingers (and your chest, if you're still religious by then) and wait for death to come knocking in the near (or far) future, gleaming sickle in hand and fashionable hood over head. Which was what the elderly man in the video chose. He was probably too old to be sliced open or be blasted with killer rays, so he simply sat back in his couch bed in his tiny Scottish cottage and waited for the rot to set in. And did it set in. It all happened so quickly. The vagaries of modern video editing technology ensured everything was fast-forwarded. The alarming sag of the cheeks and the wrinkles that suddenly sprouted all over his face. The jaundiced face and extremities. The pregnant stomach that just got bigger and bigger as the on-screen minutes ticked by. His wife watched helplessly and tried not to weep on film, although the camera closed in on her face at opportune moments, mercilessly, hoping to catch the crucial cinematographic moment when the tear ducts finally let loose its bursting load. Though I was silent, I felt like shouting. Have we lost something up there? We're willing to film someone die for the sake of reminding those clueless TV viewers that Death is constantly stalking us? Is the bill of information and entertainment something to be freely footed without so much as a murmur? The Scottish weather and scenery throughout the autumn and winter and spring were absolutely gorgeous. The flowers bloomed, the sheep grazed and the cottage sat pretty in the middle of a sunny glade. And inside, its occupant slowly degenerated into a coughing heaving incoherent mess. Tears silently trickled down his face as he recounted his lowest, darkest days. The nadir of pleading with the doctor to administer a lethal injection to end his pain, pain, pain and the doctor shaking his head and saying no, we can't end your pain, pain, pain, there are laws in this country prohibiting euthanasia, and I felt like shouting again, because it is the most cruel thing in the world to deny someone who is old enough to be my grandfather a quiet and peaceful death to relieve him of the pain, pain, pain that is twisting his guts inside-out every single waking hour, a pain, pain, pain that can never be relieved because fuck, it's cancer, for crying out loud. Just wait there for death to come, and meanwhile you'll have to take this, that and the other medicine to keep yourself alive because it's my job to keep you alive no matter how much pain you're feeling while alive and no matter how much you want to end your own life. Life. Life. Life. Pain. Pain. Pain. This man can't even be given the dignity of a quiet peaceful premature end, so he looks anguished - cue camera to zoom in on his face again - and sinks back into his sofa helplessly, pain written all over his yellow sagged face, stomach obviously bloated grotesquely even under the concealment of the blankets and the layers of shirts he was wearing. His wife blinks back tears and strokes his limp shoulder. And on and on the reel rolled, on and on, time marched on smartly and proudly, as Death visited him everyday, together with the doctors charged with preserving that corpse of a life. Death wielded a razor-sharp scalpel and gouged out a little of the elderly man, everyday, every single day, Death reached deep into the man and gouged out a little of what made that man special, what gave that man life. Gouged out a bloody fleshy mass, the essence of which all of us possess too and take for granted, and took that mass away with it silently, only to return the following day, relentlessly, without fail, just like Prometheus' liver-eating crow. Death will return everyday until the day the elderly man passed away.

And die he did. One day in April. The cruelest month, as T S Eliot once argued. Perhaps. In the midst of spring blooms and blue skies and grazing Scottish sheep, the elderly man started wheezing late one night and choking on his own uncontrollable sputum. His organs started failing one by one. The liver, the kidneys, the bladder, the spleen, the lungs finally. The windpipes protested louder and louder and it was as painful as watching a mortally-wounded patient bleed to death on the operating table. Then, he closed his eyes for the last time and his wife calmly walked to the phone and told the doctor on the other side, "Herbie's gone".

After the video ended, our lecturer solemnly dismissed us. I turned and looked at Kenneth. He was white as a sheet and deathly silent. I didn't know what to say either. I felt as if someone had gouged something out of me too.

I was once like a young immature Thomas Mann: We both harboured romantic conceptions of death; death as an unreal and enchanting monolith; death as the bluish voice of distances.

I will somehow buy a cyanide pill soon. Keep it hidden somewhere in a drawer. I don't want concerned-looking people shoving crap in my face by telling me that they can't end my life when I'm half-dead with cancer one day.