‘Turn a page, and you find a new distraction, or another version of reality. Is this not the search for a fuller kind of experience? Art, which helps us focis on our quality of life, might also inspire a richer understanding of our mortal existence.’
‘There’s nothing straightforward in the relationship a thoughtful person has with their Self, and especially with its human frame, in which body-image is just the most visible manifestation of that inner dialogue. Ageing only makes the dialogue more complex. How to shed early-life fantasies or mid-life anxieties, and acquire late-life wisdom?’
‘”I don’t think ageing is the loss of youth. Ageing is ageing. Every stage of the life cycle is potentially interesting if you don’t thikn of it elegiacally, if you don’t think, ‘What have I lost?’ but instead, ‘What can I do now?’ There will be more possibilities when we are 70.”‘
‘In [Adam Phillips’] long essay Darwin’s Worms, he expresses this resilience […]: “People’s capacity to survive loss and even deastation is at once a banal andremarkable fact. We can’t help but be amazed by what people live through.”‘
‘Works of literature fill the void of faithm but in the end, everything goes pear-shaped. The best-laid plans fail. Trust in good health ges betrayed. Futures go south. Rational projections spin awry; families implode. Chance, fate, old age, mortality, and finally oblivion take over. Bereavement cuts through the hopes of living like a schythe.’
I’ve been thinking about death. A lot. As in, all the time. As in, everything is blighted by my thoughts of it. I find myself apprehensive about seeing my parents because I will be looking for signs of frailty, ageing, ill health.
People endure this, have done for millennia. Yet I feel (normally perhaps) that I can’t, or that I am not doing it properly.
Since losing my grandparents last year I feel that the whole world is different and will never be the same – likely a common feeling after losing the matriarch and patriarch of any family. The grief I feel continues to form like skin over hot milk. I try to drink but to clings and scolds my lips. I scrape it away and it gradually reforms.
‘In Grief Works, Julia Samuel, a veteran grief counselling, explored the necessity of coming to terms with grief and the emotions associated with loss. Samuel writes, […] “Our culture is imbued with the belief that we can fix just about anything and make it better; or, if we can’t, that it’s possible to trash what you have and start all over again. Grief is the antithesis of this belief: it requires endurance, and forces us to accept that ther are some things in this world that simply cannot be fixed.”‘
I am on the verge of talking to my GP about it, for fear that it may continue to get worse. I know I woudl benefit from talking to a psychotherapist but due to a job change I will be a little short on money for a while. In the meantime there are books (thank goodness for writers!) I’ve been wondering whether reading a lot about death is helping or hindering. I’m not sure, only that writing it out here does feel good. I recognise that at least some of my resistance to entering the flow state is because time seems to disappear. The alternative is to sit and do nothing and feel depressed, but at least I have the illusion of controlling time, of grasping it. Ironic considering that ‘seize the day’ means doing something with it rather than nothing. The sitting is at once comforting and depressing.
What the hell is all this about!? Where’s the get out clause? Oh crap the get out clause is death. Well that’s no good!
I am coming to accept that death is my thing. Now I just need to accept that we are all ageing and will die. Sitting and waiting and despairing would not be considered a good death, not to mention a good life. Yet I seem to have lost my way, hopefully just temporarily. I am clinging to the remainder of my 30s like a life raft with a puncture, clinging to useful plastic rather than lying back and floating like the RNLI recommends. I’m living in a panic that might kill me prematurely.
‘I have lived with the mystery of the brain, and I think I am happy to fade into a mystery beyond the magic of the cortex. Intellectually, that seems like the best bet for the future.’
