I believe that after death we just stop; there is nothing else. So, I don’t have the comfort and luxury of hoping to meet people again. This only adds to the brutal finality of death, and means that every moment of life is precious.

I am in awe of life, of nature, the cosmos, science, literature, music and art. I’m lucky; though I have arthritis with a lowered immune system due to medications, I’m otherwise reasonably healthy. I love my job as a humanist celebrant (when I’m not shielding, as now). My family consists of my husband and grown-up daughter, my sister and nephew and niece, all of whom I love very much. I have a lot of interests and crave as much time as possible to continue them. I do not need to feel that my genes will go on; they won’t – my daughter is adopted. But I believe love goes on, for a while, and when it stops because no one is left to remember you, then in a way it doesn’t matter. ‘All things must pass.’ So, something of me will go on, for a while, in my daughter.

Of course, what I want is to live a full life for as long as possible and die peacefully in my sleep at a ripe old age. But, I’m a realist, and I know that might not happen, so I don’t dwell on it. Shielding has made me think more about my own death. I don’t want it to be because of Covid. Hopefully, it won’t be. In the meantime, I intend to make the most of life, which, as always, means embracing the lows as well as the highs, the sorrow as well as the joy, the dark as well as the light. It is now that matters.

I dyed my hair shocking pink mid-pandemic as a cheer-up measure. Friends wanted to see photos of it. One noted, ‘Enjoy yourself. Keep smiling in your pink hair and cherish your time with your grandchildren – you’re making memories for them that could be around the next 90+ years’.

My death is getting closer. If I live to 90 I have 20 years left. Cherishing those years holds my legacy to the future and my part in it. I am not dead until all memories of me have been sequestered by those who hold them.

Memories are vested liveable moments when you can conjure up the presence of those physically gone. My mother died 3 years ago but she often seems to be at my side and more frequently in cold, windy weather which she hated. It’s been windy recently. I hear her telling me, ‘I’m not going out in this scarifying wind’, and I smile to myself.

Chris, my dead husband, visits me in my dreams, giving me words of his confidence that I can handle whatever situation is bothering me.

Mortality is one-sided. I will be dead, but for others I will be in a different form of life. Memory life. I won’t be ‘here’ except in what others experience as my ‘hereness’. I won’t be able to interact from myself, only from what they create as my responses.

Thus, now, I still have means to shape those creations to some extent. My grandchildren may remember my pink hair. I hope they remember I love them. I wonder if they will tell their grandchildren stories about me and the times we planted acorns, confident of the generations ahead enjoying the oak trees.

My responsibility is huge and I may have 20 years to fulfil it. Mortality is one type of end. The legacies, gifts, and memories of it are possibilities that stretch beyond mortality.

Thoughts Towards The End of a Lifespan

I’ve lived more than my three score years and ten.
Hips, knees and fingers all ache to be still.
My once-smooth skin is lined and getting thin.
Departed friends have left big holes to fill.

But now at last I’ve free time to deploy
Without the need to please all those I see.
Grandchildren and their parents give me joy;
And savings let my thought and life be free.

As fellow baby-boomers disappear
I wonder what I will have left behind.
Some things I’ve done and said others can share;
My genes you’ll now in better places find

Each night, relaxing with a sigh of peace,
I hope death’s much the same: just breathing’s cease.

Phil on Death

When did you first meet?

I first met Death when I was ten years old living in a boarding school. My grandmother and uncle died around the same time. I wasn’t allowed to go to the funerals. I became very depressed and it led me into an uncomfortable preoccupation with Death, which lasted for years.

When did you become friends?

I studied evolutionary theory at university and it is really through this that I recognised Life and Death as two great forces that drove creativity and change. They were both essential, and both responsible, for love, diversity and beauty.

What do you like most about Death?

As an artist I can’t help but be in awe of the power of death, the mystery and even the glamour. It can also be a motivation for exceptional behaviours, for creating and expressing life. Exquisite really…

What do you least like about Death?

I am still scared of Death. Of course I am. I can’t quite bring myself to accept Death. I hope that my ideas and actions live on, at least for a little while, in the memories of others.

Then finally, as my body balances on the cusp of nothingness, I will look back and know that I loved and cherished life. I think that will be my comfort.

I don’t have an overly philosophical approach to my death and, to be honest, I don’t think about it that much. I know that it will happen, probably before I want it to, and that when it does I will be like the Norwegian Blue in Monty Python’s wonderful Dead Parrot sketch: no more! … ceased to be! … a stiff! … bereft of life!

Rather than making me anxious or leaving me searching for some role for myself in the cosmic scheme of things, the certainty and finality of my death gives me comfort. Knowing I have but this one life means that it is entirely up to me to fill it with joy and meaning while it lasts. Its value is mine, and mine alone, to determine.

But – and this is very important to me – even after I die, I know that the best part of me will be left behind. When my family embraces love in its myriad forms, has a festive Sunday roast, gives a weird gift, talks openly with each other about what they’re feeling, chooses doing the right thing over taking the easy option, argues semantics, and laughs at things it is not polite to laugh at, I’ll be there with them. These are my gifts to them and will have been theirs to me.

I don’t need more than that. It’s enough, and I am happy.

‘I do not fear death’, said Mark Twain. ‘I was dead for billions of years before I was alive, and it caused me not the slightest inconvenience’. For me, the idea that my own mortality is something I have to ‘come to terms with’ is an odd one, like saying one has to come to terms with the fact that night follows day.

My consciousness and personality clearly cannot survive the death of my brain and the rest of my body. It’s obviously impossible. How could the various atoms and molecules which comprise my dead body somehow reform themselves into a version of myself and continue living in some way? And would I really want them to? Equally, the notion put forward by religions that human consciousness survives death in some ‘spiritual’ form can only ever be a matter of pure speculation and imagination. There is no evidence for it: on the contrary, all the evidence is that death is the end of the individual.

So I accept that after I am dead I will no longer exist, any more than I existed for the first 14 billion years following the Big Bang. The truly amazing thing is that I am alive right now, looking out of my conservatory window as I type this, watching the sparrows on the bird feeders, and admiring the snowdrops on the rockery as the weak February sunshine slants across them. For me to exist a certain sperm had to meet a certain egg. My parents had to be born and survive long enough to meet each other, as did their parents and their parents, and so on back (almost) ad infinitum. Being alive is so remarkably unlikely, statistically speaking, that it needs celebrating every moment of every day. So the answer to my own mortality is simple: I try to live healthily so as to postpone my death for as long as possible; and I try to live well and be happy while I am here.

At 85, with the coronavirus circling, I of course think about my mortality. But it seems to me there is a difference between wanting to live, and the reasons for doing so, and not wanting to die. I don’t want to catch the virus, I don’t want to die period. That is instinctual. If I say to someone ‘I don’t want to die’, it would hardly make sense for them to answer, ‘Why not?’. There are circumstances that might make one want to die – intense and incurable pain for one; but without them, the survival instinct is paramount.

What though are the positive things that make me want to live? I have no children, but I do have nephews through my wife’s family, and we look after them. I look after my wife, as she looks after me. The sense of being valuable to others is key. If I couldn’t be useful to anyone at all my desire to live would be much diminished. But not extinguished. I’d still look forward to enjoying what I enjoy, books, music, movies, pleasures of the table. For a keen chess player as I am, there is always the lure of playing one more good game. And so forth.

All said and done, I want to go on living. But my time will come. I have two sources of comfort about that. One is the famous saying of Epicurus, ‘Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not.’ That seems to encompass the finality of dying, and its mysterious absence.

And then there is the universe, its unimaginable size and age. The atoms that made up my person and their attendant consciousness will be infinitesimally small specks in the vastness. The ‘I’ that I was will be in good company.

I must admit I don’t think about my mortality a lot even though I am aware that I’m getting older and nearer the end than the beginning of my life. I tend to live in the present or just a little while ahead. I’m almost surprised that I have ‘got away with this’ for so long and know I’ve been lucky.

I do think about deaths and different ones I have known: suicides, unexpected death, and death at a very great age. I feel that the end of life can define the feelings that others have about a life and yet we all have a story in us at any stage of life. I have been lucky to have had a really full life. The most important thing has been family and the joy of watching my children grow up and now parent themselves. I’m proud of how they are all contributing to the world and they are kind and generous. They will be my legacy, as will the relationships I have had in my life. As long as there are enough good people about, things will work out.

There are still so many things to do and I hope I feel like this right to the end. I like to take up as many opportunities as I can as I’ve seen people who didn’t get the chance. I hope I don’t spend too long thinking about my mortality and spend longer thinking about all the things I have heard seen and done. I know this will depend on whether I lose my mental capacity. I’m just going to travel in hope.

Growing up, I seemed to think about everything more than my friends did. I often thought about dying, or being dead. It may be explained by the Friday night meetings I got taken to by well-meaning Plymouth Brethren Christians. They collected us in their cars (no child protection or safeguarding back then) and took us to a small hut in the local village which was owned by the highly respected Postmaster. There, we were fed sweets whilst simultaneously reciting bible verses, and gustily singing choruses that spoke of black hearts; the blood of the lamb; and hell, fire and damnation. To my 9-year-old sensitivities it was all completely horrific.

Those early experiences shaped me irreparably until, in my forties, I became aware that I had been afraid my whole life, and that what I had been taught back then about my life and my inevitable death had coloured everything I’d been told since. I found the strength eventually to begin to unravel the belief that I would be judged when I died and hopefully go to heaven. I had long since reckoned that hell was a fantastical and outdated notion. I was still however left with the highly unsatisfactory idea that I would have to eternally worship an unfathomable God-type figure.

Finally, aged 47, I stepped away and no longer believed what I had been told as a child. I lost friends, and even my identity for a while, but finally I was free and no longer afraid.

One day I was half listening to an interview on Radio 4 when the women speaking announced that she would be compost when she died. My ears pricked up, what a wonderful thought, that I would simply be compost when life’s breath left me. My mortality is no longer a concern.

In my teens the Magic and Spirits of childhood coalesced into the Christian Trinity and later disappeared altogether. Life seemed pointless. I saw the meaning of life aged 27, when my first daughter was born. I now search for the why in the universe but no longer the why in my life.

My life is the tiny bit of time allotted to me but what is time? When I was young I thought of time as Newton’s clock ticking throughout the universe. But my perception is that one minute is just a proportion of the minutes I have lived. Recently, I read that time is merely our perception of chemical changes – there is no such thing as a universal time. Maybe a mouse’s two years of life feels the same length as my 70 years. Maybe my 70 years feels the same as a yew tree’s 1000.

So is an 80 year lifespan enough for me? I have been parented, I have been a parent myself, and my children are parenting my grandchildren. We haven’t changed the world but we did well enough. I have had a good life so, although I don’t want to die, I am not afraid of death. I am content that my atoms go back into the earth and my genes live on. I get pleasure from nature, family, and friends but I think they are the results of programs running in the biological computer called ‘my brain’. Passing on my genes was what made me feel complete.

Suppose I was given an afterlife? I would have to be me for all time. I am a better person than I feared I would become when I was younger but I am far from perfect. I don’t want to be me for eternity.

Death? I’m terrified by death; my to-do list is too long for death. As a humanist, death is a sign of the finality of my being. The end of me. I struggle with the idea of no more internal dialogue. Nothingness. It seems hardly credible, let alone possible. But it is so. I do occasionally feel jealous of my religious friends, with their presumed self-assurance of immortality in another realm. Humanism brings with it rather a cold, harsh reality of life: the end of me really is the end of me.

But, humanism brings a way to deal with this harshness: make the best of my only life. Okay. I’ve become vegan. I have walked the wards of hospitals as a pastoral supporter. I imbue critical thought in others; how to spot snake oil from palm oil. I’ve started a charity that aims to tackle inequality. I look to treat everyone I meet with respect and warmth. To build bridges and not walls. Especially with people who have very different outlooks on life to myself.

If death comes sooner rather than later, I may not finish my to-dos. But I know I am making the best of the life I have. If I am unable to continue with my projects, maybe others will pick up the batons I leave behind; maybe change for the better will occur after my demise.

Humanist mortality is harsh, but it offers the means by which to make the best of it. I must bring meaning to what I am and what I do. By following humanist principles, I can meet my finality, safe in the knowledge that I did what I could with the time I had and maybe, hopefully, make the world a slightly better place in the process.

I have had, and continue to have, the best of friends. In my younger days I taught P.E. and have enjoyed a physical life.

I love nature and the feel of the wind in my face and blowing through my hair. Storms are my favourite, in particular to be near the sea and see the crashing waves.

I have loved boxing and judo and aikido, and those friends I made have remained true to me. Grateful is a word I would use for my experiences in life.

As I am older now I look back and smile and continue to enjoy each new experience. Savour it all.

No one knows how the end will come and my hope is that I have not offended too many but that I have made many people smile. Being well thought of is important to me.

Some people who I thought highly of have died now and they are missed because I felt they were rich in character.

I have had one or two health scares and I know there is a fragility to life. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. I do not feel afraid as I know that life follows a pattern.

Living on a farm I see life and death on a regular basis.

It would be good to think in some way I have enriched the lives of others and I hope I have been kind to people.

Make the best of every opportunity and keep smiling.

Things begin and things end.