Death
I have just received the news that my cousin, Sarah, has died. She was not just a cousin but also a close friend for most of my life. She helped me grow up in my adolescence when I was struggling to understand these strange creatures called girls who had suddenly imposed their importance on my existence. She was like the big sister that I never had to me then. She bought cider to celebrate my O level exam results when I was 15 and at a loss as to how to celebrate and welcomed me and my children for a holiday in Southend when I was nearly broke (and not a little broken) after my wife left for another. She shared my love of gardening and football, although in the latter case for different teams; hers were Napoli and Italy, mine Chelsea and England or France. She married an Italian and lived most of her life in Italy.
I’m told she died peacefully and, as with my mother, at a stage when she could do little or nothing for herself. She was three years older than me. And had led a full life and wasn’t religious.
I have written to her family to say that I am very saddened by her death but, in a way, happy for her. I think that when one can do little or nothing for oneself, certainly none of the things one likes to do, then that is the time to let life go. The most one can hope for is that the end is peaceful.
Attitudes to death change over time and according to beliefs. In the past, when the large majority of people were religious, I think death even in late age must have been feared more than it is now. If you knew you were about to die, presumably you thought you had three chances: heaven, hell or, if the jury was still out, purgatory (or equivalents in beliefs other than Christianity). So you had to do a kind of reckoning in your mind as to how many Brownie points you might have accumulated in your life. How well had you followed the prescriptions in the Scriptures or the Quran or whatever and what repentance might recover in your favour. In any case it wasn’t an inviting prospect and certainly one for apprehension. Atheism makes for a kind of quietude, if not with a bare bodkin, as Shakespeare would have it. My hope, when my time comes, is just to die peacefully (and in mid-project; I can’t live without a project).
