' We're all in the departure lounge, waiting to see who will be next'
Life - nobody gets out of it alive. So why is contemplating death such a taboo subject?
COVER STORY
Lynn Barber
There's a great moment in the Barbie film where Margot Robbie blurts out, 'Do you guys ever think about dying? and everyone is shocked. But I can assure you that oldies like me (I'm 79) think about dying the whole time andtalk about it too. In fact, it's our absolute favourite topic of conversation. But we can only talk about it among ourselves- it's disastrous to talk about it in front of the young because they get upset. They think it means we're depressed and start recommending antidepressants, or saying, 'Oh, don't worry, you'll never die!', which just shows how stupid they are. But actually, some of my most invigorating and cheerful conversations have been with fellow oldies about dying.
Funerals or, better, memorial services are our great social events. It must be a decade or more since I went to a wedding, and I was never that keen on weddings anyway, whereas now I go to several funerals a year. They area chance to catch up with old friends and lay bets on whose funeral we'll be attending next. It's as if we're all crammed into the departure lounge, waiting to see who'll be next through the exit door: 'Oh, I didn't think it would be her, she always seemed so fit. Which → of course is often said with a certain glee when someone who wore a Fitbit, didn't drink, didn't smoke and talked about their vitamin supplements makes it out of the exit before old reprobates like me.
Naturally we oldies are all in favour of assisted dying - some of us would make it mandatory. The only question is at what age? My parents lived to 92 and I have absolutely no desire to emulate them: by the time they died they had no surviving friends. Until this year I would have said 80 was the best time to go, but that now seems a bit imminent. Make it 85, so I have time to de-clutter the house, as I'm always promising the daughters I will do. A life insurance actuary once told me that after 90 years old, your chances of dying in the next year don't noticeably increase.
You could die at 92 or 102, who could say.
I remember when I was working at Sunday Express in the 1980s being in an interview with a famous medium called Stokes. She asked if I wanted to be in touch with someone on the other side. I looked blank and asked, 'Other side of what?' She said, 'One who has passed on.
Oh, you mean dead!' I exclaimed, but she flinched at the word. 'I meant someone you loved who has passed on.
I racked my brains but, honestly, couldn't think of any. Parents? Still alive. 'Grandparents?' she pressed. Well, yes but actually both my grandfathers died before I was born and I didn't like either of my grandmothers. 'Could you put me in touch with my childhood dog, Zulu?' No, she said, she didn't do dogs. So, somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to take a message from my maternal grandmother who, Doris reported, said she was 'watching over me from the other side' , in other words spying, as usual. Poor Doris obviously found me a disappointment.
To think I was then in my late 30s and still hadn't 'lost' anyone I cared about. Death was not on my radar. But then, in my 40s, a couple of acquaintances and then a very dear friend died of Aids, and death began to move closer. I still didn't worry about it but I could see it was a possibility. And in my 50s things really sped up. Two friends died of cancer, another of alcoholism, one of a heart attack. My husband David and I used to spend every New Year in Venice with a gang of friends and pose for group shots on the balcony. Looking at those pictures now, it's like 'Ten Green Bottles' one fewer of us every year.
My husband died in 2003 when he was only 59. He developed a disease called myelofibrosis and was given a bone-marrow I was widowed before I was 60. His father transplant but died in the course of it, so and both my parents were still alive and thought it was unfair that I had to listen to complaints from three nonagenarians while newly widowed myself. But it taught me an important lesson about death: it is completely random. You can'texpect it or plan for it; it just comes. About five years ago my Twitter feed started featuring ads for 'funeral insurance' and I wondered if they knew something I didn't, but evidently not. In any case, how mad would you have to be to spend good money on paying for your own funeral? My daughters ask occasionally whether I have any special wishes for my funeral and I say,
' MY DAUGHTERS ASK IF I HAVE ANY SPECIAL WISHES FOR MY FUNERAL AND I REPLY "NO" BECAUSE I WON'T BE THERE. '
'No, because I won't be there.'
It's not death we worry about but dying, and the big question is always: how long will it take? You used to hear of people dropping dead of a sudden massive heart attack, but that seldom seems to happen any more. We all envy the late Queen dying in her bed 'of old age' but perhaps you have to be the Queen to be allowed to do that. Otherwise it's all hospitals and medical interventions which I don't fancy at all. Why does it have to be so difficult to die? Why can't doctors just hand you a death pill when they make the terminal diagnosis and say. 'Take it when you feel ready. Why do we have to ask anyone's permission to die?
Nowadays death is the last taboo. We're not supposed to talk about it. We very rarely even see except on the news. In Ireland, in the past, when Granny died, her body was laid out on the kitchen table and all the family, friends, neighbours, even children gathered round, so death was quite a familiar sight. Not now. This is crazy, isn't it? I think we should all be more accepting of death, and talk about it more, not treat it as some embarrassing unmentionable. After all, it will happen to us all. In fact, it is dead common.
Michael Odell :
I think Barbie was right to raise the question of mortality while on the dance floor. These days, it's while throwing shapes to, say, Abba's 'Dancing Queen' at a wedding reception or birthday party that I most often think, 'Christ, my knees! I'm dying here! I've just turned 60 so joint ache is a definitely an early intimation that none of this is for ever.
I'm getting plenty of other nudges from the Grim Reaper, too. Like everytime, approaching Birmingham New Street station, I pass the huge HS2 building site and inwardly say, 'I'll a probably just about see that finished: Whereas whenever I hear Elon Musk banging on about his proposed colonisation of Mars, I think, 'Hmm. I should see the first crewed flight takeoff in 2029. But the actual sustainable colony planned for 2050? I won't be around for that one unless I eat a lot more salad.'
l accept that large infrastructure projects are a funny way to measure life but I distinctly remember, as a late-20-something, watching grimy faced English and French workmen on the news, blinking away the dirt and shaking hands. The two sides had just met digging the Channel Tunnel and I thought: 'I can't wait to try that! Now I sense the world, rightly, is being shaped for younger generations.
Sometimes, sitting on the bench outside my local Waitrose, I think, 'What will I leave behind?' Only because the bench is dedicated to a local who, it says, 'loved nothing more than to sit here and enjoy the view'. The view is of a zebra crossing. Is that a life well lived? And what message would I leave to the world? My favourite is still comic author Spike Milligan's idea for a headstone: "I told you I was ill."
Still, I hope Barbie didn't get too bent out of shape at the thought of one day going to landfill. Contemplating death isn't a bad thing. A mortal reminder can work like a good G&T; it's an early evening sharpener to prime one for the fun that remains. Because, in lifetime terms, I am definitely getting into the last evening. One can either slope off early to bed or forget that niggling knee and hit the disco one last time. →
againRoll
QUIRKY ROUTESTO THE AFTERLIFE
PHILIPPINES:The Igorot tribe places bodies in coffins nailed to cliffs, believing the deceased need to be as close as possible to their ancestral spirits.
SOUTH KOREA : Ashes are turned into bonhyan (beads) that are displayed in their family home, so they stay close to loved ones in their next life.
MADAGASCAR: The Merina tribe has a ritual called famadihana, or 'turning of the bones'. Every five years, the deceased are removed from their burial crypt and wrapped in fresh cloth while family members talk to the body and update them about worldly events.
TIBET: Buddhists embrace jhator, or sky burials. Bodies are cut into pieces and left on a mountain for vultures to eat. When they fly off, it is believed they carry the person's soul to paradise.
PHILIPPINES: Bodies of the Tinguian people are placed sitting in a chair for around three weeks wearing their best clothes, sometimes with a lit cigarette between their lips, so they can continue enjoying worldly pleasures in the afterlife.
Mary Killen
When I was roughly four years old, a sister called up the stairs of our house in Northern Ireland, to ask had I cleaned my teeth. "Yes", I lied. The voice (of a babysitter) replied back: 'Did you know that wee girls who tell lies will ago to hell and roast on a spit for all eternity? The babysitter had been indoctrinated by fire-and-brimstone church sermons of the era, but I could never ask my parents if she was right. That would have meant admitting I'd told a lie. Moreover, if she were right, then it would upset my parents to think of my going to hell. And so I cringed in vague terror for years.
As the decades rolled on I stopped believing in hell - and heaven, for that matter. I half-heartedly believed in reincarnation for a bit but have always been too busy to think these things through so put them on the back burner.
I never want to give or think about my age because I'm very suggestible. Being faced with the cold fact will make me think, 'Hang on, if I'm that age, isn't it about time I died?' For the same reason I don't dwell on my death.
My friend Anne, 89, says that the palms of her hands have become dry. 'This is what happens to apes, she observes. 'Their hands eventually lose the ability to grip branches so they will fall off the tree and die. It's nature's way.
I'm aware that nature will want me to be dead too one day. But what's the point of thinking about it? I can't know what will happen to my 'soul' and therefore can't plan ahead.
'What happens when you're dead?' I asked the late birth guru Betty Parsons. It was clear to those who met Betty that as he had a hotline to the 'people upstairs'
'We can only perceive what we have the faculties to perceive, answered Betty calmly. 'But whatever it is, I know it will be benign.
David Aaronovitch :
Readers may remember those spurious studies that used to claim men think about sex a ridiculous number of times a day. And I always used to wonder how they made their calculations. Was it like one of those hearing tests where you sit in a booth and press a button every time you think you detect a squeak?
Now 69, I would find it easier to answer the question 'How often do you think about death?' because a truthful response would be, I practically never don't think about it.'
Looking back, was there a moment when death overtook sex? Was it 25 years ago, when my father died? Or 12 years ago, when I very nearly bought the farm myself after minor operation went horribly wrong? I lay in a hospital bed for a week after coming out of ICU aware of a sort of darkness that had collected in my peripheral vision. It's never quite gone away.
The Grim Reaper always finds a way these days of inserting himself into my consciousness. Last Thursday I got together with three old friends for dinner in a swish restaurant. The first glass of wine was poured and Oliver pulled out a document and asked us, ' Would you mind witnessing this? It's my will.'
Recently YouTube's algorithm god decided to cheer me up by recommending a US channel called In Memoriam, which - year by year - recalls the deaths of 30 or so famous people and the causes of their demise. I woke up several hours later having watched a dozen of its videos, transfeed by the fact that most of them died younger than I am now.
But then I can't see anything into death. I was playing with my adored two-year-old first grand daughter the other day and suddenly there it was a negitive thought : Will she remeber me when I'm gone?'
Julie Burchill :
Sometime in my 40s I discovered on the internet that my name featured on a list of people in the public eye who would soon likely 'buy the farm', 'go west', join the church triumphant' , - in short, die. I can't say I was bothered. As it was run by fellow (lesser) hacks, I presumed that it was partly wishful thinking. And I was doing masses of cocaine in those days, from the age of 25 to 55, when I gave up literally overnight, so it seemed fair comment.
Now I'm 64, I'd actually be more surprised if I featured on such a roll call: I'm nearly ten years off the marching powder and, for my age, fighting fit. But again, I wouldn't be a bit upset. Because as I get older, my fear of death, never huge in the first place, just a normal amount of trepidation.has lessened. Now, when I think about dying, I simply imagine the biggest embrace that ever existed.
I've experienced the deaths of the people I loved most in various ways. My son, by suicide, at 29. My father, at 70, dying slowly from the terrible disease of mesothelioma over decades; my mother, also at 70, dying of a heart attack in my arms.The same thought came to my mind about all three: they weren't ready to go; they had so much more they wanted to do. But I am - and I don't.
Sorrow is sometimes an inappropriate response to death : when a life has been lived completely
'I IMAGINE THE BIGGEST EMBRACE THAT EVER EXISTED'
honestly, completely successfully or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a celebration. I've had the time of my life: it would be weak, needy and greedy to be reluctant to leave the party.
And anyway, the after party will be even better.
