Of late I have been much preoccupied with death, so it was with some trepidation that I went to see Nell Dunn's searing new play 'Cancer Tales'.

Performed for charity, the play was about five ordinary people's encounters with cancer: for two hours, they talked about their physical pain, their emotional distress and, above all, their loss of dignity. In a couple of cases, friends, family members and lovers recounted their experiences of coping with the tragedy unfolding before their eyes while they were helpless witnesses, doing all they could to lessen the suffering. Two of the patients die on stage and we are told how their loved ones deal with the loss.

Performing without sets or backdrop, all the cast is together on the stage and actors are lit up by a spotlight as their turn to tell their story comes. Stark and bare, the stage nevertheless throbs with powerful emotions as one by one, the patients and their companions recount their 'cancer tales'. And throughout the performance, the invisible presence of death stalks the stage.

Having buried a much-loved elder brother barely two months ago, I empathized very closely with the survivors. Salman's last month in this world was almost too painful to behold: his lungs having collapsed after a lifetime of smoking, he was on a mechanical ventilator in the ICU of the Aga Khan University Hospital.

He was fed intravenously and his frail body kept alive by a number of pipes and tubes that snaked in and out while his breathing, heartbeat and blood pressure were constantly monitored electronically. For an intensely private person, this total dependence on strangers was far worse than the physical pain.

As he could not speak with the ventilator in his mouth, he tried to signal his wishes with gestures and would get terribly frustrated when we failed to grasp what he wanted. Later, the doctors performed a minor operation that enabled the oxygen from the ventilator to enter the throat directly. Although this reduced his pain, he was even more annoyed by his inability to speak, specially since his mind was clear right till the end.

When a near relative is ill in Pakistan, time for those close to him slows down as they wait. And wait. We waited for the specialist treating Salman to talk to us and tell us what was happening. And when we were told his chances of survival were remote, we waited for a decision from the Ethics Committee on our request to end his suffering by removing the life support system.

In the end, the doctors declined: while they may have had sound professional grounds for their decision, it was agonizing for those of us who were with Salman for many of his last hours. But I must record my gratitude to the doctors, nurses and administrative staff who were unfailingly courteous, highly professional and deeply sympathetic.

During this vigil, my two brothers and I always took reading material to the hospital. At one point, I asked Salman if he would like me to read to him; when he nodded, I looked for an appropriate volume from his vast collection. Salman was a bibliophile and much of his life was spent collecting books.

Blessed with a wonderful mind and an excellent memory, he was a fount of information on the little-trodden byways of history, particularly the history of early Islam. But in his younger days, his passion was poetry. In particular, he had read and re-read Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot dozens of times, and could reel off entire stanzas by heart.

After much consideration, I picked the selected works of T.S. Eliot that had been much underlined by Salman. Feeling pleased at my choice, I took it to the hospital the next day; unfortunately, Salman was not in the mood to listen, so when I was in the waiting area, I began reading from the collection. Here I have a confession to make: a lifetime of bureaucratic drudgery and hack writing have not been conducive to reading much poetry.

Perhaps 'prose' and 'prosaic' have a common root, and I do not have any poetry in my soul. Whatever the reason, my acquaintance with Eliot was a nodding one at best. Or perhaps I can better understand his poetry now. In any case, I found a great deal to engage my mind and distract it from its grim surroundings.

For some years now, there has been a continuing controversy over the concept of mercy killing in the West. Recently, there was a furore in Britain when a couple flew to Geneva and was helped to die by a Swiss society that assists terminally ill people to find peace. In this particular case, the couple was in constant pain but their ailment was not life-threatening. The British media took the Swiss authorities to task for not preventing assisted death in this instance.

Many doctors have grappled with the moral dilemma of keeping patients alive on life support when they are in a coma and have virtually no chance of recovery. In more cases than the public knows about, they have quietly pulled the plug on patients who are in agony and stand virtually no chance of survival. These are some of the most difficult decisions a person can be asked to make, and I know the doctors treating Salman were torn when requested by us to stop his suffering.

This column was not intended to be Salman's obituary: he is remembered with love and affection by all those whose lives he touched. Young people specially recall the time he spent talking to them and his recommendations of what books to read. My greatest regret is that caught up in work, writing and socializing, I did not spend as much time with him as I ought to have. Had I done so, I would have been a better-read and perhaps wiser person. Above all, I cherish his late gift of poetry. Among the underlined verses of Elliot, I thought these in particular struck a chord with Salman, given his deeply - if unconventionally - held religious beliefs:

"The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to GOD." (From "Choruses from 'The Rock" by T.S. Eliot, 1934)