AVOIDING THE ANTECHAMBER OF DEATH

David retired from Singapore's Foreign Service at the end of July 1993, just four months past his eighty-fifth birthday. Only Chi Owyang (1897–1988) — Singapore's ambassador to Thailand from 1974 to 1988 — had served as emissary beyond such advanced years. If anyone thought that David, with failing eyesight and poor knees, was going to happily fade from the public scene, they could not have been more wrong. Any man David's age would have been content to retire happily, surrounded by family and good friends, kick up his feet, and savour a well-earned rest. Not so for David. “Retirement” was a word he hated. It was, he said, “the antechamber to death” and he had no wish to die. Indeed, death was something he had difficulties coming to terms with as he reached his twilight years.

The last four years of his ambassadorship had been particularly difficult. David's eyes deteriorated to the extent that he even had trouble reading with the closed-circuit text enlarger that enabled him to enlarge text to six times its original size. In 1992, he was so depressed about his condition that he thought of stepping down as ambassador, but his friend and Singapore's ambassador to Brussels, Mrs Jaya Mohideen, encouraged him to persevere and serve out his final term. In an interview with The Business Times in 1992, David told reporter Margaret Thomas (daughter of his old friend Francis Thomas), that there “is nothing good about old age”. For David, nothing could be worse:

He found the loss of “animal energy” the most debilitating for it was impossible to express one's personality in action when old and sapped of animal energy. When asked how he would make the best of old age since it could not be avoided, he thought it was best just to ignore the fact that you are old and do what you've always done. Quite clearly, while the eyes may have dimmed, the spirit had not and David had every intention of practising what he preached.