SIGN OF THE TIMES

 

The focus of one of my earlier blogs was on herding the copious amounts of time that one is confronted with after the world of work has imploded from either exhaustion or a cosmic collision with some other stellar thing. Retirement is cool but it comes at a price.

I turn 64 soon and my family genome points me in the direction of having ten more years on the firmament before the reaper comes a knockin’. While the uneasiness of mortality isn’t something that comes around for a coffee ‘catch-up’ every day, I do have the feeling that we’re going to get to know each other much better as those ten or so years progress. The caffeine conferences may well increase in frequency and that’s not something I look forward to. Maybe I should forego the sugar insertions to the flat white as a buffer to impending doom but who knows? Free time and thought sometimes aren’t good companions.

Death doesn’t quite terrify me as yet but that’s probably because I figure that I’ve only just started on the bell lap of the ghost train. There may be some thrills and spills ahead which will distract this punter from pointing the torch towards the edge and activating google maps to estimate how far it is away.

The concepts of god, paradise, the afterlife, heaven, nirvana and original sin have never really appealed to me. They’re things that you often hear some citizens referencing in their later years after decades of knocking the top off in younger, idle and simpler times. I suppose that religion is a comfort when the prospect of nothingness confronts the older punter but it only seems like a convenient and artificial wicket-keeper and not a very skilled one at that. If Wally Grout was on the gloves I might tell a different tale……. but I don’t think so.

You do hear some weird things, however. The notion of already dead relatives looking down from the ‘church triumphant’ up behind a cloud somewhere is an evergreen parable that is regularly tossed around at birthdays, weddings, funerals, line-dancing dives and podiatry clinics. Why don’t these souls yell out so that we can see and hear them? And why are they always smiling? Or so the story goes. Of course, all of this is the stuff of fairy tales and denial. As an authorised agent for engineering an effective and convincing worldly exit, religion has a lot to answer for. I guess we members of the ‘church militant’ will just have to soldier on.

An even stranger variant is the relatively recent trend to honour dead people on their birthdays. You often see these homages on social media sites; e.g. ‘Jimi Hendrix would be turning 217 today if he was still alive. Happy birthday, Jimi!’ Reality check- Jimi’s not 217. He’s dead. He’s not anything really. Jimi might be jamming with the Big Bopper somewhere sometime but the smart money is on neither.

The rituals surrounding old farts procrastinating prior to the last gasp could fill a psychoanalyst’s field notebook. One of my favourites is the bucket list phenomenon. Whether it’s jumping out of a plane, visiting some grotto full of bat shit or ingesting exotic vits at an overpriced, ‘aspirational’ noshery, it all amounts to the same thing…….. the forestalling of the inevitable. You can tell when you’re in the presence of an elderly dud when you either see or hear them publicly ticking off items on their ‘to do’ lists. Delusion is a bloody strong influencer.

Mary Roach once wrote……. I don’t fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine that death presents like a holiday at the beach. The reality is that most of us will probably see the reaper alighting from the bus just outside our front gates. Medical advancement, like religion, is culpable.

As a response to all of these thoughts and fears, only time will tell…….. at least while I’m still in a state to measure it.

P.S. Who’s up for a Wally Grout at the next coffee encounter/ ‘catch-up’? (Editor’s note- Paul, Wally’s dead too.)