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.

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.