On Mortality

Our temporariness is such a short time.

I strive to do my best.

I strive to accept my best is ‘good enough’.

I fear deterioration in mental and physical capacity. To me, those capacities enable me to contribute my best to life on earth.

On the other hand, I accept an end to living. Life on earth thrives from cycles of ideas, inputs, happenings – beginnings and endings and lives in between.

I accept my influence is in the now. We are finite beings.

We need to prepare ourselves: to learn to step aside; to pass on to others; to pass on the baton!

The pandemic has emphasised our vulnerability and our mortality. I have talked more about death – the end – during this unusual time. The end is non-negotiable. It is harder to talk about getting there. This path is more ‘messy’, more unpredictable.

My uncle whom I did not know well died recently at the age of 94 years. I knew him from afar as he emigrated to Canada with my aunt in 1955. From when I was a child, I thought of him as an adventurer and courageous. He broke the mould and broke the rules of the time! He grasped life and opportunities. He was a thinker and wise counsel, a considerate, kind man. His family was very precious to him. His aspirations for his children, with his help to prepare and support them in their lives, was for them to be kind to each other and to others. He and my aunt also discussed the end of life and made plans, and fulfilled them courageously.

Thinking about his life and his achievements has focused my thoughts on my life and my end. Yes, we must all talk more.

I am fortunate that my life has been a happy one. Now retired, my days still fill with simple pleasures, a favourite of which are walks with my wife Lek, our still-growing family, and my whippet. Lek and I treasure above all else these times spent with our family. But I am now getting close to the end of my life. This prospect does not trouble me greatly even though, as a scientist, I discounted long ago any supernatural explanation of life in favour of one based on natural forces, including evolution, genetics, and heredity. My own genetic make-up, inherited from my parents and theirs, has already been passed to our children and grandchildren in that cycle from birth to birth that bypasses death. Although I am saddened to think that my death may cause my family grief, they will surely be comforted knowing as they walk away from the grave, that they together represent more of me than lies behind. And they will know that I loved them each and that their company was my greatest pleasure. I find immense comfort also in knowing that the same ties of heredity binds us to all life on earth, in all its various forms. We must therefore be kind, and look after each other.

Looking towards my final days, I want to avoid that greatest of all indignities and distresses, of declining into mental confusion and helplessness. If that seems likely I have planned a merciful end to my own happy life.

Mortality – that’s a tricky one. I find it difficult enough to think about a lovely summer’s day in the depths of winter, or vice versa, without trying to envisage something of which I can have no experience, at first or second hand. The only tool I have for tackling my own mortality is my imagination, which is not helpful, as it inevitably dwells on the awful ways I could die rather than the fact of dying. Like many people, I like the idea of quitting the party while it’s still going on, quickly and without warning. But that is so not good for the people left behind.

Sudden death is a physical as well as an emotional shock. And it’s messy. Even the most prepared people won’t have thought of everything and may not have updated their will or their funeral wishes very recently. That can be difficult enough to cope with, but the worst thing is not being able to say goodbye.

A ‘good death’ allows for that. Beyond making sure the important people have your computer and email passwords, there may be the doing of the as yet undone, the mending of relationships, the reallocating of priorities, the saying of things not yet said. It may be preparing loved ones for a life without you, or it may simply be creating or stashing away a store of good memories that will provide sustenance in the dark days to come.

I hope I will be lucky and brave enough to have a good death.

It’s 3.00am and my daughter is awake. I go to cuddle her and realise she’s crying. ‘I don’t want to die’, she says, ‘Or you to die. What will happen? Would you miss me?’ I get a flashback to my own childhood and the moment when the realisation hit that me and everyone I knew and loved was going to die someday. I recalled the fear, the sadness. Here it was replayed in front of me.

I want to support my daughter through her worries, but 3.00am with a 3 year old is no time for philosophy. We have stories as our common language and lots of them. I remember the stories that helped me, inspired me, that taught me that it was important to have your own story to tell at the end of your life and that you had to work hard to create it. All those little bits of hope, wisdom and guidance kept me going even though I didn’t even know I had them until I needed them.

They taught me that my own worries about death, when I was able to stand up and address them rather than shy away or ignore them, gave me insight into what I really cared about. I was thinking about the people I wanted to spend time with, and was terrified I wouldn’t get to write my own stories or learn or see anything new. My passions came to light when a limit was put upon my time. I don’t always get it right, but now I have this awareness I hope I am living in accordance with these passions, so that when I come to the end of my life, I can rest with the knowledge not that I did everything, but that I did my thing.

I was aware of mortality from a young age, due to the loss of people close to me, but found my grief was managed and directed by others. I was told ‘they are in a better place’, ‘you will get to see them again’, ‘they are watching over you’. Whilst the intention behind these sentiments was good, it did nothing to help me move on, accept the grieving, and take comfort in the best memories of those I had lost.

When I was old enough to challenge my beliefs, and really think about the ‘end of life’, I found much more comfort in living for now and not some idea of anything after this life. I don’t have any fear of death or dying. Losing someone you love is still heartbreaking but focusing on what you shared whilst they were alive, the experiences and memories, that makes grieving less painful. It also makes me more determined to make the most out of every moment.

Now I am in the position of guiding my children through difficult times, I can understand the tendency for people to fall back on what they see as paths of hope and reconciliation that may be perceived as easier for children to comprehend. But honesty is much better in the long run. Explaining that people believe many different things but nobody can give a definitive answer gives children the opportunity to find a path through grief which works best for them. I don’t know if there is an afterlife, but I believe there isn’t, so concentrate on now and live life to the fullest. I think about how I want people to remember me the most, and that is laughing, learning, loving and finding joy in everything I do. That is enough for me.

Our society shuns away from talking or thinking about death. We know it hovers in the background, like a cloud, somewhere, but we never wish to turn and look it in the face. We certainly are not encouraged to talk about it.

The deaths of my father, my much loved cousin (who was like a brother to me) and then two years ago my beloved husband, have caused me to face this wispish cloud. I am still determined to live forever, but now realise this may not be reality!

I have no children to carry on my line, a great sadness.

Instead, I write and paint, hoping that my creations will remain treasured in the world long after I am gone. Maybe they will offer comfort to others and bring smiles to faces unknown to me.

What we leave behind are memories, with our family, our friends and sadly also with our enemies. So, it seems to me that a great importance in life is to try to ensure that we have no enemies. That there will be no one who thinks badly of us in the future. That we leave only golden memories, happy memories with lots of laughter, fun, wisdom and friendship.

The way to do this is to live well, think before we speak, love others, be happy.

I want to be remembered with a smile, or not at all.

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.

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.

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.