It was a joyful death. The memorial service, held at St James’s Church, Piccadilly, was for Charles Handy, business expert and philosopher, who died last year at 92.
St James’s Piccadilly is one of my favourite London churches, built by Christopher Wren in 1684. It’s by Jermyn Street and Fortnum & Mason, haunts of Burlington Berties and London flâneurs. Just a single step from the commercial hubbub and you find yourself in a calm and beautiful place.
The church is friendly and progressive, with a programme of art shows and talks. There’s a groovy café and a garden stocked with trees and benches – just the place to eat your sandwich at lunchtime.
William Blake was baptised there in 1757, in a marble font designed by Grinling Gibbons, who also made the oak sculpture of foliage on the reredos. The church is proud of its association with anti-slavery campaigner Ottobah Cugoano, baptised there in 1773. The acoustics are fabulous.
Charles Handy was an author and so-called ‘management guru’, who wrote bestselling books such as The Empty Raincoat and The Second Curve. He was a frequent contributor to Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, and was in demand as a speaker all over the world for his gentle wisdom.
I first met Handy in 1994 when I went to interview him, and over the following three decades we become good mates. While he was known as an expert on the workplace, one of his messages was that we should cultivate the non-work aspects of life.
He loved Italy for its embrace of good living, and organised his life in such a way that he gave himself three months each year at his house in Tuscany doing nothing.
In 2018, he suffered a terrible tragedy: his wife and business partner Elizabeth was killed in a car crash. Handy, who had been driving, suffered a stroke soon afterwards, leaving his left side more or less paralysed. He reacted to Liz’s death with exemplary stoicism, remaining cheerful and free of self-pity.
I went to visit him a few months before he died, at his first-floor flat in Putney. He was sitting in the window, looking out on to the common, reading Shelley. He greeted us with his usual smile and twinkly eyes.
Though he could not hold a pen, he continued writing until his very last few weeks, by dictating short pieces to a carer. These nuggets of wisdom have been collected into a lovely new book called The View from Ninety, which I recommend to all oldies.
Handy was fantastically stoic about his impending death. When I went to visit him, I felt like one of Socrates’s friends who visited the philosopher when he was in an Athenian jail in 399 BC, ready to be executed. It’s the day of his death. They sob and weep while Socrates, 70, rabbits away cheerfully about the afterlife. He tells his friends that he’s been writing poetry. And then goes on to say:
‘It seems to me to be natural that a man who has really devoted his life to philosophy should be cheerful in the face of death.’
Death is simply the release of the soul from the body, Socrates argues. And it’s the body, with its ceaseless demands, that takes time away from philosophy. Therefore philosophers are really looking forward to being free of the body, ie dying.
In similar fashion, Handy told me he was not scared of death. ‘Either it’s an eternal sleep or we go to a better place, and either is fine by me,’ he said, smiling.
I made up my mind to start thinking about death and dying immediately.
Towards the end of his life, Socrates took up dancing lessons. In this joyful spirit, at Handy’s memorial service we sang ‘Lord of the Dance’. I’d forgotten what a lovely tune it is and what an excellent sentiment the hymn, written in 1963, conveys:
‘They buried my body and they thought I’d gone, But I am the Dance and I still go on.’
The memorial programme concluded with some wise words from Handy:
‘Yes, I’m sorry, you too will die but you will live on processed into the memory of things by the people who knew and loved you.’
