The old saying has it that the only certainties are death and taxes. Well, tax evasion is a universal sport, while super-wealthy and eccentric optimists occasionally demonstrate a taste for cryopreservation.
However, surely the subject of death, ‘so permanent and blank and true,’ as Philip Larkin wrote, preoccupies us more than taxes? We all have fears of ceasing to be, but recently English journalist Matt Rudd pondered why it is that mid-lifers are much more worried about death than old people are.
Yet my maternal grandmother, devout Christian though she was, sounded a note of rebellion that blended with one of yearning. She was past 90 when she told my mother: ‘Marjie, I don’t want to die.’ My mother floundered. ‘But you’re a believer.’ The reply was quick: ‘Oh, I’m not worried about all that; I just don’t want to say goodbye to you all.’
My other grandmother, more than twenty years younger when she died, not having reached 70, could not face a world without working in her garden. ‘If I can’t dig, I don’t want to live.’ But when she accepted the inevitable, she said, ‘I’m so disappointed.’
That’s it. People in mid-life fear death for many reasons, but disappointment must be one of them, for there are always so many things to do, so much in the world to see and to experience, a whole host of people to get to know, various ambitions to be realised, a great number of projects to be finished. Crime writer P.D. James, for example, worried every time she took a flight. ‘If this plane goes down, I won’t be able to finish my current book.’
And we are all aware of people who try new experiences at an advanced age. A friend of mine visited China when she was 87; a woman of the same age had her first ride on a Harley-Davidson, and yet another made a tandem parachute jump when she was 84.
Another octogenerian friend, an inveterate traveller, and also a mother and grandmother, once told me about flying into Heraklion in the teeth of a violent electrical storm. I was much younger than she, and certainly not as brave. ‘Weren’t you frightened?’ I asked, knowing that I would have been scared stiff. ‘Not really,’ she replied, ‘I have no responsibilities now, you see, and it does make a difference.’ All those years ago, I looked at my three young children milling around, and thought she might be right. Now I know she was.
'My blood has now settled down to a quiet simmer, and I ponder the subject of death every day, not with tranquillity, but with a kind of resignation.'
None of us likes to think of their way of life falling into the sere and yellow leaf, but life as we know it here on earth would surely become tedious if it went on forever. And the thought of death usually enhances the value of life, is ‘the dark backing that a mirror needs,’ as Saul Bellow put it. One man, knowing he was ill, told me that every day was now a present, while Clive James found that his creativity and literary output increased dramatically almost from the minute he knew his days were numbered.
Another wise man once told me that we fear death while our blood, as the Greeks say, is still boiling. ‘But,’ he said, ‘your blood will eventually stop boiling, and your fear will subside.’
My blood has now settled down to a quiet simmer, and I ponder the subject of death every day, not with tranquillity, but with a kind of resignation. But I wish my spiritualist great-grandfather, who was always going to report from the other side and tell us what death is really like, had been able to file his story.
Never mind. Perhaps those who are still in mid-life need to cultivate an attitude of acceptance, and concentrate on enjoying the here and now, which is what the old have to do. Mark Twain, satirist and sceptical Presbyterian, said he had not been bothered by the fact of being unborn for millions of years, and he didn’t think being dead for millions of years was going to bother him either.
Then there’s Catholic philosopher Pascal’s wager: those who bet on God existing have a great deal to gain in terms of present happiness and life beyond the grave. And can thus find peace at any age.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.
Main image: A person looking into a mirror with a skeleton relflected back at them (Illustration by Chris Johnston)