The Expiry Date Is On the Cards

I’ve been thinking about death again, which isn’t necessarily where you expect an article to begin on a Monday afternoon. Then again, at 66, perhaps it would be slightly odd if I never thought about it. We spend much of our younger lives behaving as though mortality is an administrative problem belonging to somebody else, something that will eventually concern us but which can safely be dealt with later. At some point, however, “later” begins to look rather less like an infinite resource and rather more like a finite one.

The thing that prompted this particular bout of reflection was hearing that Julian, the butcher, had died from a heart attack. Julian was a familiar part of the local community, one of those people who become woven into the everyday landscape without us necessarily appreciating quite how much they are there. You see the same faces, visit the same places, exchange the same pleasantries and assume, quite reasonably, that tomorrow will look broadly similar to today. Then somebody dies unexpectedly and that comfortable assumption gets quietly kicked in the shins.

What struck me was that Julian wasn’t an elderly man who had reached the natural end of a very long life. His death was unexpected, and that is what makes these things uncomfortable. We can make some sort of psychological accommodation with old age. Ninety-something feels like a reasonable time for the curtain to come down, even if we don’t particularly fancy attending the performance ourselves. But somebody dying much earlier than that reminds us of something rather more inconvenient… none of us actually knows where our own expiry date is written.

At 66, I am increasingly conscious of that.

It isn’t something I find frightening in the way I might once have imagined. Perhaps that comes with age, or perhaps it is simply the result of having lived long enough to understand that death isn’t some extraordinary event occurring somewhere beyond the horizon. I’ve seen enough people disappear from the landscape over the years to know that eventually every familiar face becomes a memory. What changes as you get older is that the abstract knowledge becomes increasingly personal. You stop thinking about “people of my age” and realise that, inconveniently, you are one of them.

There is something slightly amusing about it when you look at the numbers. Sixty-six doesn’t feel particularly ancient from inside my own head. I don’t wake up in the morning thinking, “Good heavens, another day in the elderly department.” I still have things I want to do, things I want to write, things I want to learn and plenty of opinions that nobody has specifically asked for. Yet the statistical reality remains stubbornly indifferent to how young I might feel on a particular Tuesday. The clock doesn’t care about my self-image.

And perhaps that is where the idea of living in the “now” becomes rather more interesting than the usual motivational version of it.

I’m not talking about suddenly selling the house, buying a motorbike and disappearing into the sunset because some bloke on social media has told us that life is short. There is a great deal of terrible advice dressed up as living in the moment, usually accompanied by photographs of somebody standing on a beach looking suspiciously satisfied with themselves. Most of us have bills to pay and washing to put away, and the washing will remain unimpressed by our philosophical awakening.

Living in the now, to my mind, is something much quieter. It is recognising that the ordinary things happening around us are not merely the stuff we have to endure while waiting for the interesting part of life to begin. They are the interesting part.

We are remarkably good at postponing our lives. We tell ourselves that we’ll do something when we have more money, when the house is sorted, when work settles down, when the children are older, when we retire, when the weather improves or when we’ve finally dealt with all the things currently demanding our attention. There is always another condition to satisfy before we allow ourselves to properly enjoy the life we already have.

The trouble is that there is no guarantee that the list will ever be completed.

There will always be another repair, another bill, another appointment, another piece of paperwork and another irritating little job that somehow manages to reproduce when nobody is looking. We can spend years preparing for the point at which we will finally have enough time to live, only to discover that time was the thing we were spending while we were preparing.

That thought has become harder to ignore as I’ve got older.

I find myself appreciating ordinary moments far more than I used to. A decent cup of coffee in the morning, sitting outside when the temperature is behaving itself, having a good conversation, cooking something from scratch, writing something that actually says what I wanted it to say, hearing from somebody I haven’t spoken to for a while… none of these things would make a particularly impressive bucket list. Yet perhaps bucket lists have always misunderstood what makes a life worth living.

The majority of our lives are not made up of grand adventures. They are made up of Tuesdays.

That doesn’t make them insignificant. Quite the opposite. It means that if we spend our entire existence waiting for the grand adventures, we may eventually discover that most of the life we actually had was hiding in plain sight.

I think that is one of the things that unsettles me most about Julian’s death. It wasn’t simply that someone had died. It was the reminder that people disappear from ordinary life without necessarily giving us any warning that their last ordinary day has arrived.

There was presumably a last morning when Julian got up and didn’t know it was his last. There was a last conversation, a last meal, a last time he went about the familiar business of being himself. None of those moments would have announced their significance. They would simply have been another morning, another conversation, another meal and another day at work.

That is true of all of us.

We simply don’t know which ordinary moment will turn out to have been our final ordinary moment.

I’m not suggesting that we should become obsessed with that idea. That would rather defeat the purpose. There is nothing particularly healthy about wandering around conducting a mental inventory of everything that might kill you. I have no intention of spending the next thirty years sitting nervously beside the defibrillator while refusing to cross the road because traffic exists.

But I do think there is value in occasionally remembering that the future isn’t something we own.

We talk about our plans as though tomorrow has already been delivered and is sitting neatly on the shelf. We make five-year plans, ten-year plans and retirement plans. We make financial plans, travel plans and renovation plans. All perfectly sensible, of course. I’ve made plenty myself. Planning is one of the things that allows civilisation to function without everybody wandering around wondering what happens next.

The problem comes when planning for tomorrow becomes an excuse for ignoring today.

At 66, I suspect I’m more interested in the balance between the two than I once was. I still have plans. I still want to write things that haven’t been written, explore ideas that haven’t been explored and see where some of the projects I’ve started might eventually lead. I still have plenty of curiosity left, which is fortunate because curiosity is probably one of the better things to carry into old age.

But I’m also less inclined to sacrifice the present entirely in pursuit of some imagined future in which everything will finally be exactly as I want it.

Perhaps because I now understand that “exactly as I want it” is probably another fictional destination.

Life is untidy. People disappoint us. Plans go wrong. Money disappears. Things break. Bodies become increasingly creative in finding new ways to complain. Friends move away. People we love die. Sometimes the weather is dreadful and sometimes, in Spain, it is 38 degrees and you wonder whether the sun has taken personal offence at your existence.

And yet, somehow, it is still life.

That may be the part we forget. We don’t need to wait for life to become perfect before we start appreciating it. In fact, perfection would probably be rather dull. The imperfections are where most of the memories live.

Julian’s death has therefore left me with a rather simple thought, although I don’t mean that in the sense of one of those motivational slogans printed on a mug.

We don’t know how long we’ve got.

I don’t know whether I have another twenty years, another ten years or considerably less. Neither does anybody else. That uncertainty isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system.

And perhaps knowing that should make us a little more careful about what we give our time to.

There are arguments that simply aren’t worth having. There are grudges that become ridiculous when you remember how little time any of us actually has. There are things we worry about which, five years from now, will probably be completely irrelevant. There are people whose opinions we allow to occupy far too much space in our heads despite the fact that they wouldn’t recognise us if they passed us in the street.

Meanwhile, the coffee is getting cold.

The people we care about are getting older.

The dog still wants feeding.

The sun is going down.

And another day is quietly moving into the past without asking our permission.

Maybe living in the now isn’t about squeezing every possible experience out of life. Maybe it is simply about paying attention while we are here. Taking the extra ten minutes. Having the conversation. Making the meal. Sitting outside. Calling the person you’ve been meaning to call. Laughing at something completely stupid. Writing the article even though nobody may read it. Saying thank you when you could easily have walked away without doing so.

None of these things stop us dying.

They simply make the time before we do a little more like living.

Julian’s death is a sad reminder of that, and I don’t want to dress it up as anything else. Somebody has lost a life, a family has lost someone, and a community has lost a familiar face. There is no inspirational lesson that makes that less sad.

But perhaps there is a lesson for the rest of us.

At 66, I have finally realised that the expiry date is on the cards. I just can’t read the date.

None of us can.

So perhaps the sensible thing is not to spend too much time worrying about when the card will be turned over. Perhaps we should spend a little more time looking at the one currently in our hand and deciding whether we’re actually making the most of it.

Because this particular day is one of the ones we were given.

And once it’s gone, nobody is handing it back.

Until Next Time