Member-only story
End Of The Road
How our attitude to life shapes how we deal with the inevitability of death
At the age of sixty-one I’ve already lost a lot of people during the course of my meandering journey through life. The early losses, incurred during the vulnerable years of childhood, were traumatic. I spent a great many years trying to save everyone, which is not only a logical impossibility but also a fool’s errand.
It seems to me that there are phases in our lives and if we’re very fortunate we get the time to pass through each phase in turn.
When we’re young and vital, of course we want to devour life. We’re hardwired to live and thrive and mate and reproduce. We want, as much as possible, to live out the archetypal stories given to us by whatever culture we happen to have been born into.
Reality, however, is far more complex than simplistic stories and we rarely get to coast through life on a magic carpet of benevolence. So we learn about struggle and disappointment and defeat and occasional victory. If we’re lucky we have the astonishing good fortune to reproduce, love our children, watch them grow, and finally see them leave to create their own independent lives.
Throughout much of our lives we try to hold on to the things we care about. This is a trait deeply conserved by evolution because for most of our history we’ve never been…
