Cancer 23

Sleepless nights on uncomfortable hospital beds (too narrow, too short) does mean that I potentially have a lot of time for thinking. On the other hand the pain, the tiredness, the beeping of monitors, the noise of other patients and the movements of nurses are less conducive to thinking.

One thought that pops up, perhaps because it ia a cultural norm, is that of fear of death. We think that the dying fear death; many people say they fear death, so do I fear death? The simple answer is that it is the wrong question. I have no reason to fear death. There is no bearded fairy or fork-tongued demon waiting to determine whether I should spend eternity in the clouds or in a pit of fire. That is just daft, and is partly why I have no respect for religion or religious practice.

Mark Twain made a good point: ‘I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.’

A religious person might argue this is flawed as we may begin to exist at the point of birth (or conception) and then continue for eternity, but really? What is the logic behind a soul not existing before birth (or conception) and then continuing after death? It is death! End. Completion. Finshed. Done with. Over. Kaput. Muerte.

I think the real question, for me at least, is not around death itself but missing out. Of course once I am dead I am not missing anything, but now, before I am dead I can and do think about what I will miss out on, such as having more happily married years, especially post-retirement, just doing things together. It doesn’t matter what we do, it is missing out on being together. Perhaps I am greedy as I have had nearly 30 very happily married years. I am also missing out on children growing up. Some I have met, but some have not yet been born.

I am missing out on the books I wanted to write, particularly novels. I will never know whether I can write a good one. I probably won’t even see my current book, Applied Narrative Psychology, come out, though it is almost finished. I should get on with it instead of scribbling blogs!

These are just a few of the personal things I will miss. There are more, but in a more general sense will I see another winter? Will I see snow? Will I ever go abroad again? I certainly won’t see the UK take its rightful place in the EU. But these things don’t matter (apart perhaps from rejoining the EU) neither do any of those ‘places to see before you die’ ideas. I don’t understand them. I’ve seen places. I’ve not seen others. So what?

If I ask myself the question, what do I want to do if I get another 6 healthy months, I don’t know the answer. I suppose it is a sign that I am happy that I don’t really want to do anything different to what I have already been doing. Yes it would be nice to do certain things but if they don’t happen then I don’t really care.

Presumably this is the good life – but that can be a question for another day.