In September 2023, Simon Boas was diagnosed with throat cancer. Aged just 46, he was told the disease was terminal, and that it would ultimately take his life. Over the following year, he knitted together his reflections on life into a book - A Beginner's Guide to Dying. The book is set to hit the shelves in October. It will be a posthumous publication.In what he expects to be one of his final interviews, Simon spoke to Emma Barnett on the Today Programme, offering his reflections on life and death as he moved into hospice care. My pain is under control and I'm terribly happy - it sounds weird to say, but I'm as happy as I've ever been in my life. I used to think I'd rather be hit by the proverbial bus, but having a couple of months knowing this is coming has really helped me both do the boring 'death-min', but also get my thoughts and prepare myself, and feel so accepting of what's to come.It's been such a great bonus, actually. The book is called A Beginner's Guide to Dying, but really what I'm trying to convey is how enjoying life to the full kind of prepares you for this. In some ways I was lucky that my life and my career have taken me to quite a lot of places where death is more a part of life than it is for us in the West. I spent my life as an aid worker - quite a lot with the UN - and I've lived in places where death is something that not just exists in the background, but is imminently possible. I spent three years running a UN office in the Gaza Strip. I spent a lot of time in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and I've been working in Ukraine. Seeing people there for whom death is such a part of life - they lose children, they don't know where the next meal is coming from - has really helped me. I've also been a Samaritan for the past four years. In some cases you are on the line while people end their lives, so I think death has been more a part of my life than for many people. It does us all good to think about it. That's not in a gloomy way... by kind of realising it's inevitable and it's a part of life, ...