I think about Death a lot. My death. It’s probably an age thing. I’ve noticed people my age getting ill, dying. I realise that I’m nearing the age when my father became ill. It’s no longer something I can avoid, nor stay oblivious to. One day, I will cease to be. 

It’s such a difficult thing, to consider one’s nonexistence. To me, life is a constant flow, interrupted by sleep and the rare hospital operation, but these are just instantaneous leaps, rather than gaps. It’s always it’s one thing after the next. I can’t imagine the flow ending, but some day it has to. One moment awake, the next, gone.

I think sometimes about sudden death. Being hit by a train, a gunshot or a bolt from the sky. An abrupt transition, where death visits perhaps without you even knowing it. No struggle, no fight, just permanent closure. How strange that seems to me.

I think about slow death, the brain losing its faculties bit by bit, consciousness falling apart. Heart still beating, eyes open, but nothing happening inside. Night announcing itself early. How strange that is too.

I think about living forever. The thought scared me so much when I was little. It frightens me less, now because I don’t think it’s possible. Even if you could live forever, you would eventually crave death. Coming to an end is less scary than continuing on and on, past all things and people familiar to you, past the extinction of our species, past the swallowing of the Earth by the Sun, past the heat death of the Universe. And yet on forever from there, as if all that time was nothing? Sooner or later it would all be too much. Death simply makes sense compared to the alternative. 

I think about how mundane death is. How it’s there every day. On our roadsides, in the trees, beneath the waves – the constant background shuffle of somethingness into nothingness. Such a natural part of existence.

The meaning of everything I have and will encounter. The experiences I have, the people I know, the places I have been to, the joys and the devastations. How it all will mean nothing someday. I think about that a lot.

I love my life. I do not want it to end for a long time yet. Being alive is such a wonderful thing. Having death as a backdrop, the ordinary becomes precious, the casual contacts important, the friendships priceless. One day I will die, but I’m not sure I would have it any other way.