By Ian McDonald
When I was young I sometimes used to sit in the evening with an old aunt while she told her rosary beads. I remember she once said to me that when each day was ending she always did two things – she looked back and thought how beautiful the day had been, remembering even the simplest things, and she thought about her death.
To a child it seemed a puzzling combination, but she was a serene and joyful old lady so I assumed it was no bad thing to do. Later, of course, I saw that there was religious significance in her evening thoughts that turned in two such different directions – praise God for the beauty of the day but remember also that such beauty passes away all too soon. It was like the warriors in ancient Rome who paraded in triumphant glory after victory but always had a slave beside them whispering in the ear as they rode: “Remember, you too are mortal.”
A strange thing is that when I remember that serene old lady talking about her own death I remember it did not seem morbid at all – it seemed natural, a commonplace of conversation. I do not think that happens so much nowadays.
How often do any of us think about our own death? We read enough about death in the newspapers; we hear enough about death on the radio newscasts; we see more than enough of death on the television. But this is death at third hand, impersonal, removed from us. Our own death is a different matter – we flinch away from that.
And it is not surprising that we do. There is a saying that there are two things a man cannot do – one is to gaze at the burning sun with his naked eye and the other is to gaze upon his own death, that darker sun. Any of us can understand that. Personal extinction is terrible to contemplate. It is not easy or comfortable to feel, for instance, that in, say, four thousand days your life will end – yet each of us can do an easy calculation and find, with perhaps a cold shock of surprise, that the sum of our days is not so large after all, and there will come a time when mornings will come which we shall never see.
To most people these will seem morbid thoughts, especially because death has become the new pornography, taking the place of sex years ago. Now it is somehow obscene to talk openly of death. It is not an approved item for ordinary discussion. It does not enter into decent conversation, just as long ago sexual intercourse and female orgasm were considered unfit subjects for discussion in mixed company. Death is the taboo subject of the modern age.
Yet I believe that it is important that a man thinks sometimes about death coming to him. And, I should add, I do not say this particularly for religious reasons. Indeed, I sometimes think that formal religion, religion of the textbook, deals with death in a way that muddles and muffles its true significance.
There are three essentials things about death. First, it is inevitable. This, of course, is stating the obvious, but the fact is that most of us go through life as if we had endless time to live. We therefore fritter away our days as if they are not by far the most valuable gifts we have, gifts swiftly passing through our hands as if we do not care since they are without number. They are not.
The second thing about death is that it is final in the sense that it puts an end to life as we have known and loved it. I can understand the comfort-seekers who hide from this truth behind thoughts of God-given physical immortality of some sort. But the fact is that only sublime faith can with certainty believe that, and only the greatest mystics have had such faith. Religious teaching is mostly putting on sunglasses against the blazing sun. I myself cling to a desperate hope which claims that something in us, quite inexplicable for now, will endure.
The third and most important thing about death is that it gives purpose and point and spice and heightened value to life itself. We do not live forever, so the life we have is unutterably precious. We should treat it so – our own lives and the lives of others. Every moment we are fortunate enough to have should be lived to the full, whatever we happen to be doing. Do not be like the old man in CP Cavafy’s poem who sits thinking how little he enjoyed the years when he had strength and wit and looks:
He knows he’s very old now: sees it, feels it.
Yet it seems he was young just yesterday.
The time’s gone by so quickly, gone by so quickly.
And he thinks how Discretion fooled him.
how he always believed, so stupidly,
that cheat who said: ‘Tomorrow. You have plenty of time’.
And it is therefore right to think sometimes of our own death coming – life becomes that much more sweet and vivid, and the smaller, gossipy, foolish, irritating things of life fade away then into utter insignificance.
