Mortality

 

I guess when you’re young you don’t really think about death so much. There is a sense of invincibility. But as you age it creeps into the narrative more and more. The first time death hit me, (not literally, I hasten to add) was when I lost my maternal grandmother. 

 

I loved her dearly. She and my Mum didn’t always see eye to eye, but I thought she was wonderful. She had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and medical knowledge wasn’t as great as it is today, and poorly managed she started to lose her eyesight. I remember when I was preparing to leave home and start my student career, she wanted to buy me something useful. She decided upon a blanket. I wanted a tartan one, but she felt it and rejected it as not being substantial enough. She continued to feel all the blankets until one felt ‘right’. It was an olive-green Witney blanket that I kept on my student bed. I still have it. I remember the store too. It was a Co Op! When the Co Op still had department stores! A very strong memory of the last day I would ever spend with my Gran.

 

That was the day I took my leave of her before I was due to leave for college. She stood in her doorway, and I stood on the doorstep, holding my blanket. Suddenly she pulled me to her, weeping about how much she would miss me. As a gauche 18-year-old I was bewildered by this unfamiliar show of emotion from her. My mum pulled me away quite roughly I thought, and I left my beautiful grandmother weeping on her doorstep. I didn’t know then that I would never see her again. 

 

I wrote to her frequently from my college room. My parents were away on a six-week world tour for my father’s job. So, I knew she was lonely. Bright yellow paper. Big black handwriting that I hoped she could read without help. She wrote me back, letters I still have, telling me I was always her girl and she missed me. Then one day towards the end of my first term at college I received a message to call home. I was unconcerned believing it to be the welcome news that my parents would drive down and pick me up for the Christmas holidays. I phoned my Mum and I’ll never forget her chilling words that Gran died yesterday. “No, Mummy, no!” I remember screaming down the phone. I hadn’t called her ‘Mummy’ in years. The phone was situated a public place in my hall of residence and a fellow student, seeing and hearing my distress took me off to her room and made me a cup of tea. And that was the first time death hit me. Her funeral was the first funeral I ever attended. It was a burial. I cannot remember a thing about it except for standing by the graveside and my uncle saying that the one thing she would have been cross about was missing Christmas. I didn’t understand how he could joke.  

 

Now as I have aged death has become a more regular occurrence. Family, friends, neighbours. I attend funerals almost regularly. And of course, the thought of one’s own mortality starts to become a frequent thought. Out of my group of friends from school who I hung out with after we left school, I am the only one left. It’s sobering and it’s lonely. Memories cease to be a shared thing. 

 

And it hits me quite forcibly that, of my siblings and I, one of us will be left behind one day. I cannot imagine life without my brother and sister. I cannot predict who of us will ‘go’ first but the impact on all of us will be profound. I find myself worrying about them both more and more and needing frequent contact. 

 

I have a close friend who’s about eighteen months younger than I. She was diagnosed with kidney cancer during lockdown and there was a brief while when they said that it had spread, and we thought it was ‘game over’. I remember the chill when she told me, the disbelief, the imagining of life without her friendship for we’ve had so many adventures over the years. It seemed unthinkable that life could continue without her. They retracted that original diagnosis. She had a partial nephrectomy and is currently awaiting the results of her annual scan. But it feels like a temporary reprieve. And the time will come when one of us will be gone and whoever is left will have to deal with void of that lost friendship. 

 

Of course it is no different for people everywhere. Death is all around us. Death is part of life! But as you get closer to it you start to think about it more. One of my worries is not death itself exactly. I do wonder how it will happen. I experience such myriad pains and twinges throughout the course of a day I find myself wondering if they herald the beginning of the end. Obviously, I don’t want to suffer but I worry more about the mess and inconvenience I leave behind. The trappings of my life. Who will clear it all away? I’ve made a will leaving everything to my niece and nephew but neither of them may be able to go through my home and sort it all out. If I expire before my siblings, I don’t want them to have to trawl through my possessions. Sometimes I look at all my possessions, things that are familiar and dear to me and I know that most of them will probably end up in landfill. And it starts me thinking about the nature of our material lives and what it all means. What will happen to all my books? The signed copies? What if the house doesn’t sell after I’m gone? I don’t want anything to be difficult for those I leave behind. 

I have become more aware of the need to preserve life. The snail I unwittingly crushed or the fly trapped inside my home and left to expire on a window sill cause me much consternation and anguish. A life has ended and I am culpable. It can happen that quickly. So I take more care. 'Hurt no living thing.' Christina Rossetti. Practice Ahimsa.

 

And I think of all the things that I still want to do, places I still want to see, people I'd like to see again, and the stark reality is that I probably won’t. There comes a point as you age where hope and possibilities cease. And it’s a combination of the ageing process and the physical limits that can impose. You also start to wonder how long you’ve got left. I remember an aunt of mine in her late eighties who would wake each morning and wonder to herself, will it be today? I know of people who have reached a point and wanted to die. A dear friend of mine who reached her late eighties was struggling to get about and had been diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer’s was openly desirous of dying. She got her wish a couple of years ago.

It's strange the effect this all has one’s behaviour. The wasting of time becomes inexcusable. Those days when motivation is elusive, and momentum seems lacking. The level of frustration is immense. For time is running out. I find myself denying myself purchases that I might not have given a second thought to as a younger person. I ask myself if it is worth it at my age? And I look back to the past more than I ever did. The snatch of a sixties tune can bring me to tears for the memories it evokes. Sometimes, now, when I can't sleep, which is often, I go through my childhood homes, room by room picturing not just the furniture and effects but the occasions and the events. Sometimes I can even imagine the tastes and smells I associate with those times. It all feels so precious and I feel I took it all for granted. I wish I had savoured it all more.

 

And then there are some days when the sun is shining and the air has that particular, indefinable quality to it that evokes such a sense of yearning and upliftment and I watch that same sun sparkling on the sea as the tide comes in, the screech of the gulls and the twittering of the goldfinches, a sky so blue with cloud formations that take your breath away and I find myself so grateful that I have lived this day to experience it.