Contemplating mortality is not about being prepared to die, it is about being prepared to live. And that is what I am doing now, more freely and more fully than I have since childhood. The cancer has not made life more precious – that would make it seem like something fragile to lock away in the cupboard. No, it has made it more delicious.
Simone Weil expressed something similar. She died at 34, Inge at 51.
In August 2026, I’m 84½. Does it feel precious? No: “a struggle” is more like it. Along with eternal gratitude.
PS. See this post, written 15 years ago, which includes these devil-may-care phrases:
- I’ve spent my life getting lost. So intoxicating was the sunshine that I got lost again on my walk yesterday, though as a proverb says, “You ain’t never lost if you don’t care where you are.”
- …there is some logic behind my illusion of having woken up from a bad dream, to discover that I am still in the same (nineteen-year-old) body and seeing through its eyes. It has been said, “Youth is wasted on the young”. And how often do people say, “If only I knew then what I know now!”
