Nigel Latta has died, aged 58. Photo / Harper Collins Publishing
Psychologist and broadcaster Nigel Latta has died aged 58, following a battle with stomach cancer.
His wife, Natalie Flynn, shared the news on social media that Latta died yesterday following a cancer battle fought with “enormous bravery”.
On the day of his death, Latta’s long-awaited book on his life and what he learnt from his cancer diagnosis, Lessons on Living, was released.
The Herald had been in conversation with his book publishers at Harper Collins and can share this extract of Latta’s book with readers.
Below is the book’s first chapter, giving readers a look inside his life, his legacy, his battle and the importance of pulling up a seat for conversation.
I once sat in a room with a man who’d kicked someone to death for no real reason at all. I was in the room by choice; him not so much.
I was there in my capacity as a clinical psychologist completing a risk assessment; he was there because it was a prison, and he didn’t have a lot else to do. He smelt stale, I remember that, as if the air never quite reached his skin.
‘How you doing?’ I asked him. He just shrugged: ‘Okay.’ And I remember thinking there was a whole lot to unpack in that response.
I’ve sat in a lot of places at the far edges of things that a lot of people never get to see. I once sat beside a woman who had been through all kinds of horrors and was hanging on to the will to live with ragged fingernails chewed all the way down to the quick, and another time with a kid who still found joy in the world even though his whole life had been stained with abandonment and cruelty.
I once sat with a mother who’d seen her child murdered in front of her, and another time with a man who wore the uniform of a Catholic priest but was really just a hole in the world into which children would fall.
I’ve sat in the cockpit of a fighter jet slicing a hole through the sky as the pilot said into the intercom, ‘You have control’, and felt all that speed and power through the stick, and banked left as steeply as I could without risking a telling-off.
When I was a teenager I sat beside my best friend at the literal edge of a 200-foot cliff as he explained how he’d read in a magazine you could abseil without a harness, and then proceeded to loop the rope about himself in a rough approximation of what he’d seen in the article, took up the tension, and slowly walked back over the edge.
He made it to the bottom, but that was A-grade teenage lunacy. I’ve sat beside people who were so rich that money didn’t have any real meaning to them, and people who were so broke they literally couldn’t feed their kids.
I once – in a moment I will always treasure – sat beside my daughter in an ancient fortress high in the mountains of northern Iran, the two of us completely alone, and another time beside a family of strangers at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia – a building that is unquestionably one of the most beautiful structures humans have ever conceived and made real.
I once sat at the feet of a swami in Pune, India, who sounded like the real deal but just said a bunch of silly nonsense like a clumsy tarot card reading. That’s when I learned that weird long pauses can make even tissue-thin banalities sound profound.
I’ve sat with prime ministers, and rocket scientists, and an Oxford maths professor who is both an actual proper 100% genius and the most lovely man I think I’ve ever met.
I’ve sat with hard-core violent gang members, and I’ve sat with Buddhist nuns, although not at the same time.
And once, in a moment that was equal parts magical and zoological, I sat at a respectful distance keeping a dying Weddell seal company at Cape Bird in Antarctica as countless Adélie penguins traipsed up and down the beach between us, unmoved by either sadness for the dying seal or the breathtaking beauty of the place itself. Say what you like about penguins, but they are not sentimental in any shape or form.
And a few months ago I sat with a very nice doctor as he was telling me that the tumour they’d found in my stomach was incurable, and he estimated it would probably kill me in about six to 12 months.
I know, right? Type quickly.
Right now I’m sitting in a comfortable leather chair, on an overcast Tuesday afternoon, in comfortable slippers talking with you.
I’m now several months into chemotherapy for that incurable stomach cancer and I’m currently in my new default state, which is a shifting malaise of fatigue and nausea.
And yet, in spite of all that, I feel deeply and profoundly lucky.
I have lived a full and interesting life so far. I wanted to see the far edges of it all, the extremes that exist in the world, life and death, and everything in between … and I have.
All things considered, it seemed like a good time to stop and reflect a little on the journey thus far. Although it might be more accurate to say that when you get a diagnosis of incurable cancer, it pretty much punches you in the face over and over until the only way out is to do some reflecting on your life.
In all those sometimes magical, sometimes terrifying, and often surreal moments I’ve found myself in over the last 57 years of just being alive generally, and over 30 years working as a clinical psychologist, I learned things about the world and how it works.
I learned a lot about people, and why we do what we do, and I learned just as many things about myself and how to make things happen in my own life … and in the lives of the people around me.
Over all those years, I’ve assembled a personal toolkit for living, three simple principles that have taken me to all those places and all those people, and all the things I’ve ever done.
And that same toolkit has got me through some difficult times as well … like the whole cancer thing.
And it also helped me find my way to the woman who is the great love of my life.
Which made me think maybe I should share that learning with you, on the off-chance it may help you in your own journey. Then I spent some time thinking about just how to do that? I could just give you the list and say, ‘Go forth and do that stuff’, but that isn’t how real learning happens.
Real learning happens in the context of living the day-to-day ups and downs of our lives.
Real learning happens in a real life.
So I’m going to tell you the story of how I built this mental toolbox within the ups and downs of my own life. These are very simple ideas, but they’re embedded in a rich context. I didn’t have all this worked out from the beginning; I assembled it over time as I blundered from one confusing mess to the next.
We learn the most from our failures, not our successes, which has worked out very well for me because I have f*****d up a lot of stuff in my life.
There’s a line that runs through it all, but it’s not a straight line. We’re going to need to zig and zag along the way.
Sometimes I have to start at the end and go back to work out just when, how, and most importantly of all why I wired in each principle.
This will be an unpredictable ride, and I am, by nature, a pretty zig-zaggy kind of guy.
It’s more fun that way.
Lessons on Living: Finding your way through life’s ups and downs by Nigel Latta is out now. Published by HarperCollins New Zealand