Welcome everyone to this week’s post. Especially those of you who are new subscribers this week. My post subjects vary a lot week by week, so don’t judge me on just one that you’re not keen on - there’ll be others that you might adore! This week’s subject has been going around and around in my head for a while and I thought, just write this down, okay? So, it’s a bit of a stream of consciousness, but I hope you receive it as the tumble of thoughts that it is, and not be put off. It’s about death and dying.
Still with me? Okay, here goes.
In the past few months, three people who were my close working colleagues have died after relatively short illnesses—renal failure, lung cancer, stroke. They were all in their 50s or 60s. My brother—mid 60s—is being treated for prostate cancer with bony metasteses. My dear friend is being treated for relapsing lymphoblastic leukaemia; my oldest friend tells me his sister has been diagnosed with lymphoma; a close cousin is approaching end of life with lung cancer. None of them are more than 5 years older than me, some a few years younger. I’m 68.
For the first 25 years of my working life I was a Registered Nurse working clinically. Quite a lot of that work was about caring for the dying and for their relatives. At first it was quite hard (I wrote about my earliest encounters here) but with knowledge and experience came an acceptance and a way of appreciating and responding to the many ways of reaching the end of a life. It was a special part of my job. Plus of course, I was young and death was something that came for other, and mostly much older, people. I could respond in a caring, but relatively detached way. Of course, I’d encountered death before—grandparents and great-grandparents, ageing uncles and aunts—all deemed to have had a ‘good innings’ and all an expected part of life. Even when my own parents died, aged 92 and 91 respectively, it was their time and was more celebratory of their lives than filled with mourning.
Now that I am older, that previous sanguinity seems to have deserted me. I find myself realising the meaning of those words from the Order for the Burial of the Dead:
“In the midst of life, we are in death:…”
and I didn’t really see this more acute awareness coming. Or maybe I deliberately closed my eyes to it. Death and dying are no longer reserved for the old and the ‘others’, but are increasingly happening amongst my contemporaries. Colleagues, friends, and relatives seem to make contact with alarming frequency with news of life-limiting illness either amongst themselves or amongst our circle of friends and acquaintances. We have become the ‘old’ and the ‘others’. In the midst of our lives, death comes calling and it is harder to pretend it’s a long way off.
Many of us on Substack write about ageing, and ageing well in particular. I’ve written about the freedoms that come with age, the lifting of pressure on looks, appearance, fashion, work, and other expectations. I celebrate the wisdom that has come from years of life’s trials and errors, the knowledge, the experience, the acceptance, the self-knowledge. I look forward to living every day that comes. I am currently reasonably healthy. I am optimistic and happy. Please don’t get the idea that I am doom-laden! But the understanding that one’s own life is more past than future, and that there will be an ending that may not be too far away, is a different level of acceptance. Memento mori looms a little larger.
When my grandfather was still alive, us kids would joke about his hobby being going to funerals. It seemed that every week he would be off to ‘pay his respects’ to someone or other. We would tease him about his ‘funeral suit’, and how the car could drive to church or chapel on its own. It took some years before I understood it was because he was in that age-range where his peers were, well, dying.
I guess this realisation comes to all of us as we reach older age, but we don’t really talk about it; how it feels, how we cope as our contemporaries become ill and die, how it’s no longer ‘them’ but ‘us’. I confess that I have never really thought about it before, after all, who wants to consider their own demise? But I do want to learn to deal with it better, for my own sake, and maybe that involves thinking about it a bit more, and talking about it. After all, I can’t be the only person who would rather explore it with words rather than ignoring it because it’s too difficult. I’m not morbidly obsessed or anything; as I said before the awareness is particularly acute now because of what’s happening to people who are my peer generation. My working life has meant that I am reasonably… no, I’m actually very good, at interacting with others in this situation—I have the words and the compassion for friends and close relatives, comfort without sentimentality—but right now I am beginning to feel my own mortality, and it’s the hardest thing.
Next week I shall be back to walks and flowers, the sea and the weather, knitting and the trials of bathroom refurbishment, I promise! I always said that this Substack is about the things that I am thinking about and that it might be anything, from knitting to gardening, from reading and writing to walking and nature, to random thoughts about anything at all. Well, lately my own mortality has been in my head, so I wrote it down and I am glad to have the opportunity to let these thoughts run and form and circle round, and to have them go somewhere other than just inside my head. Thank you for reading and listening. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in facing ALL THE THINGS about ageing, not just the ones that can be given a positive spin!
I’ll write soon. x
Thinking and talking about death is so important to life. I’ve been thinking a lot about illness lately as well, as I’ve found that knowing at least five people under 40 who have or have recently had cancer is worrying. 40 doesn’t feel old. It doesn’t feel like an age of illness, and yet.
Substack keeps showing me more and more posts about aging. I’m wondering if the algorithms know something I don’t know. I prefer to just think young.