The D-word
I find it bizarre how rarely we talk about death. As a society we are more burnt out than we’ve ever been. One in three people report being stressed and 284 million people worldwide have an anxiety disorder. But I don’t need to look at statistics to know this. I know a lot of anxious people around me, with me as the spearhead. The worries du jour tend to be: losing lovers, keys, hair; food poisoning; our cup size; IBS; CPC; where to spend NYE; not being paid enough in our jobs. Some have elevator phobia, some can’t stand a closed bathroom door, others sleep with their light on, and all of us have nomophobia (the fear of losing one’s phone). And yet, I’ve rarely heard anyone say in a trembling voice, ‘I’m terrified, positively handicapped, and deeply puzzled by the fact that I will, one day, inevitably die.’
Every now and again, despite our resolute efforts to repress such thoughts, we’re forced to think about death: when we ask someone at a party how they’re faring, and instead of putting the much-preferred mask on, they strike us back with vulnerability and the unwanted news of the death of a grandfather; when someone (braver than us) posts a photo on the Facebook feed of the girl who passed away in fourth grade; when we rouse from a daydream at a wedding just in time to hear the vicar’s speech as he alludes to death and illness again and again.
But in those rare moments when our minds touch upon such thoughts, we try to wash them clean as quickly as we can, with the same zeal and paranoia with which we were spraying disinfectants on our hands in 2020. We fear they might alter our biochemistry, take the reins of control in their own hands, fill back the tracks of the rutted grounds of our familiar routines.
Apart from the fact that we live as though we are immortal, what I also find bothersome is how little interest we have in what happens after death. Some people believe in rebirth, some say we’re headed for heaven or hell, and the cynics and scientists insist that our flesh just decomposes, our cells becoming one with the muddy ground. Fair enough. But how is any of these things OK??? How do we not spend every hour of every day talking about it?
I think we should talk about death every day. Death should be the first thing that we think about when we wake up and the thought that puts us to sleep. I think we should substitute our daily trips to the barista with walks around a graveyard. We should listen to strangers’ obituaries instead of the morning news. We shouldn’t read stories to children about how Little Red Riding Hood and her grandma are eaten by a wolf and then saved by a woodcutter, but about how even if the wolf hadn’t eaten them, they would have died sooner or later anyway. When we go on dating apps, what should induce us to swipe right shouldn’t be the height of a prospective partner but just how terrified they are of wasting their life.
The disciples of the law of attraction might say that if we spend time buried in such gloomy thoughts, we might attract such experience and be all the more miserable for it. But death is something that we have attracted, the minute we were born, and I hope this isn’t news to anyone. The only question has to do with time. Would we manifest a lethal experience more quickly if death became part of our daily discourse? Maybe. But what if instead of a car accident, we attracted the life changes that often come after one? What if we attracted a more meaningful way of life? What if our irrational fears were substituted by those that could propel us into sensible action:Am I wasting away my talents on my current job? Am I making the most of the gifts that I have been given? Am I spending my time with the wrong person? Have I forgotten to tell someone important how I really feel about them? Is it, perhaps, time to forgive?
As I like to live what I preach, just today I began my day by reading an essay by A. A. Gill. He was a ‘giant among journalists’, an obscenely talented man. Reading his words often fills me with an electrifying mix of admiration and envy. He passed away in 2016 at the age of sixty-two from cancer. When I finished reading his column, I googled him. I looked at his big smile and blue eyes; I read about his writing career on Wikipedia. I thought about his daughter, Flora, whom I follow on Twitter. As warm wet tears streamed down my cheeks, I felt sadness, apprehension, a tightness in my chest. But also a desire to reshuffle my priorities, a surge of energy for the task at hand, a gratitude for the hours ahead of me. Here was a man who’d left a legacy behind him, a man who hadn’t wasted his life. Here was a man with a genius mind and a good heart. And here was also death, not taking its pick.
