He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery
The Good Book. Consolations. 27:29. Made by A. C. Grayling (2016)
I’ve never been fifty before, so this should be interesting,
like the day I finally decided to be happy—as if becoming a merry chap
greeting fellow carousers with a pint in his hand could assuage the guilt
I’d accumulated over the years—by taking dying classes
on a maternity ward.
I’ve come to the conclusion that slowly dying is too demanding a job
to make room for other pointless pursuits, like memorising new words
or ever-so-slightly changing faces, which of course leaves me no choice
but to outsource all the embellishments that are commonly considered
life’s essential ingredients—though it’s not as if I don’t appreciate
an occasional reminder that the regrets we draw from the callow years
are not what stimulate our due desires—and embrace the humble life
of an urban hermit with somewhat perverted interest in death.
As days of vigour wither on the creeper,
so do the specious ploys and inclinations;
yet something keeps the throb in a sagging chest
of the quinquagenarian in the making, which is fair,
for even the turning of wine into water
requires having the plonk in the first place.
A clock can’t outlive time—at best, it can tell
that your autumn holidays are an hour longer
after you’ve decided you’re just an unassuming tourist
wandering the soggy back alleys full of perplexing words
in search of the greatest passage—but as it breaks,
you notice it’s not just its hands that stop.
My bed is too small even for me, let alone another person—or maybe it’s just my life
that has shrunk somewhere along the way—yet when I wake up in the middle of the night,
I instinctively reach out for the warmth of another arm, knowing we’re not all that different
from mayflies.
Waking up in the middle of the night with a pain in my chest always reminds me of my mortality. It’s not like I think about death all the time, but touching on the subject with such an emphatic reminder is inevitable. At least I’m not superstitious like my father was, who, when asked about making a will in the face of cancer, became really upset, treating the suggestion as a wish for his death. But maybe I just had more time to get used to my condition. After all, I was born with it.
Perhaps it’s a lack of imagination on my part, but the idea of dying has never terrified me. And not because of my Catholic upbringing, with the morbid theatrics of Ash Wednesday and the promise of the resurrection of the dead that I never consciously believed in, not since I left the innocence of childhood. I simply find existence itself rather mundane and prefer to think of myself more as a bowl of petunias than a sperm whale, if I were to refer to Douglas Adams’s iconic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Too many words, too few hours of sleep with music imitating the lasting sounds of the street,
or the other way around, and breakfast like the last supper rehearsal, goaded by the mere fact
of my undeniable mortality—all of that made me feel as if I had forgotten someone’s birthday,
when in fact it was the birthday one who sabotaged my every effort at making birthday wishes.
Who would have thought cruelty could be effortless?
hidden pilcrow 