To be clear before I say what I’m about to say – I haven’t been diagnosed with anything awful (or indeed semi-awful, or indeed anything at all). I am perfectly healthy, or at least as healthy as any utterly sedentary 50-year-old has any right to be, and I have no worrisome symptoms brewing, or anything like that.
It’s just that I’ve realised I’m going to die. Like, you know, one day. One day – and here’s the key, I think – relatively soon. In less time than I have lived already, almost certainly. Almost equally certainly, in about half the time I have already lived. With a non-negligible chance of it being much less and quite possibly very much less.
Now, look. I’m not an idiot. Or if I am, I am not the kind of idiot who believed I was immortal. I just didn’t think I was going to die. Big difference. Now I think it all the time. And what I don’t understand and really wasn’t expecting was for it to come upon me so suddenly. A week or two ago, I was happily going through life – life! – not thinking about it at all, except as some vague, inescapable fate that is probably the last thing the entirety of humanity has in common except for a vague unease around the word “mucus”.
And now? Now I have to stop every 10 minutes to grapple with the fact that – yeah, I’m going to die. Like, die. Like, me. I will die and if an obituary gets written it will say “Lucy Mangan, a blurty-bling year old mother of one died [anywhere between peacefully at home and screaming in a library fire] and that’s it, really. She dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Some people are sad but they’ll get over it and she’ll still be dead. K, thx, bye.”
I thought there would be a more gradual shift. A creeping awareness. A shaded acceptance growing with every birthday until I stepped gracefully and graciously into its looming embrace at the end of my allotted span. Instead – kaboom! It’s landed suddenly in front of me with a great smugly malevolent smile on its face. Though I don’t know how it’s doing that as it also feels like a giant blank monolith standing between me and all the errands I’ve got to do today and the (only slightly) larger plans I have to be getting on with between here and – oh, hi! – that yawning grave.
I should be consumed by existential dread. I should be grappling with the implications on a philosophical, intellectual level. Instead, I’m just furious. Absolutely furious. Both with the realisation itself (now? Now?! When the dishwasher’s just packed up and the sodding idiots next door have just punched a hole through our wall as they do their 18th kitchen renovation of the year?). And with – well, the fact that I am going to die. It’s an outrage. I mean – it is outrageous. Is it not?
Perhaps that’s a function of the great privileges of the modern age. By and large, we are no longer at the mercy of all the things our ancestors once called fates. We have tamed the land, we do not cower in fear of the weather or a failed harvest, we have beaten back innumerable threats once posed by common diseases, we survive injuries and cancers and infections that were often ‘til recently impossible to imagine enduring.
With obvious exceptions we have control over our jobs, our fertility, our finances, our choice of partner. Paths of all kinds are open to the average individual in a manner unprecedented, thanks to advances in medicine, technology of all kinds, attitudes, civilisation in all its myriad forms.
But this one stubborn bugger remains. You can’t beat death, and in an age of entitlement, it looms as an ever greater affront. What do you mean I just have to accept it? I don’t accept the first quote on my car insurance, yet I’m just supposed to take this as an unassailable fact? As a kind of like it or lump it deal? What, as the people young enough not to be understanding any of this like to say, the Actual F?
I've been penny-pinching for years - now I realise my time is priceless
Read MoreI don’t really know, yet, where to put myself and this new knowledge. I’m a bit… pacey, at the moment, you know? Bit fidgety. Bit getting up and down and walking around the place trying to get a mental handle on things. Maybe I’ll settle into catatonia soon, as existential dread replaces fury, I don’t know.
Do I start compiling a bucket list? Revamp and reprioritise my entire life, psychically Marie Kondo-ing until it contains only things that are beautiful and/or meaningful to me? I don’t have that urge. I want things to stay the same, but for as long as possible – and to come to an end only at the time of my choosing. And I have to find a way of coming to terms with the fact that that is really not a feasible goal.
I think what will help right now is shouting through the hole in the wall and letting the neighbours know that another new kitchen will deter death no more than anything else we do. And that in fact, if it causes any more damage to my home, it may bring it down upon them rather quicker than they thought. And so the wheel turns.
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