I have reached an age where a number of my contemporaries have died; some have been friends, close friends and others have been members of my extended family. Though my parents are both dead, as yet no other member of my immediate family has died. A number of people whom I hold dear are at this moment in the latter stages of disease. I am slightly surprised by my reaction though perhaps I should not be; this exposure to death over the past few years has normalised death for me. I recently realised that I don’t fear death any more, at least not the fact of death. I am not so sanguine about the process of dying as I don’t think I cope with pain very well and having watched my father’s progressive deterioration with Alzheimer’s, that is not an experience into which I would like to lead my family.
What has brought me to this place? Though I still regard myself as young-ish and there are still a few years to go before I reach three score years and ten, no longer would my death be untimely. Though I know there is more I can offer, I recognise that I have already had a pretty ‘…good crack of the whip’. This is not the case for everyone; there are untimely deaths where cruel disease or circumstance takes away a young life before its promise can be fulfilled. There is also the wanton death caused by disaster, poverty or warfare. Such deaths do not fit neatly into a tidy model of the human life cycle; we should fear and resist them lest we become immune to the fragility of our common human heritage. For some people, far too many people, the normality of death is horrific but for me, the normality of death has brought acceptance and I count myself exceeding lucky.
Perhaps the fact that I don’t think that death is the end also has a part to play. But death is the end for earthly relationships and bereavement is hard to take at any age. I don’t want people to be sad when I die but I know some people will be. Inevitably, they will lose something; they will lose what I am to them, what I represent to them; an ear, a shoulder, a hand, someone who keeps the other side of the bed warm, chases them round trees, drinks with them in a pub, the grandparent of their child to be. So we cannot entirely draw the teeth of death. Perhaps one trite answer to anticipating bereavement is to give everything of yourself to your circle of significant others so that, by the time you die there is nothing left to give and nothing left to miss. Trite, trivial, unrealisable but not entirely without truth.
Part of me is driven to apologise for sharing these morbid thoughts. They have been buzzing round my head for some time now and I have written them down because they encourage me and I hope they will encourage others.
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