How do we deal with the ultimate existential crisis, a fear of dying?
What can we do when we can no longer fall back on the tried and tested answer to the majority of anxieties, “don’t worry, it might never happen,” when you know full well that it will?
I seem to have been writing a lot about death recently to the extent that I even found myself wondering if I should find a different subject this week knowing how some people prefer to look away from their own mortality.
In the end, I decided not to be complicit with such aversion, and anyway, my friend Bev died and I wanted to write something about her.
Bev was married to Jim and they, along with Trevor, ran the wine bar in Maidstone where I spent the majority of the 1980s.
It is hard to overestimate the significance of these places in which we make our mark. The rooms in which we meet and hang out with our friends, fall in love, fall out of love, learn about ourselves and the world.
It is a gross underestimation of their importance to consider them no more than places in which we drank too much. In many ways it was with these people we established the very essence of ourselves and discovered the things that make us.
If it had not been for Jim, Bev, and Trevor I may never have learned how to play Backgammon or taken part in the World Marbles Championship (which is extremely painful for the thumbs).
I would not have had so many opportunities to hone my skills as a songwriter and performer if it had not been for those Thursday evening “Reviews” every month.
I most definitely would never have had the chance to take part in a ramshackle Christmas “pantomime” alongside Monty Python’s very own Graham Chapman who played some sort of bird because the beak he wore, made of cardboard and silver paper, was a souvenir I took from that show and kept as a treasured possession until it was lost one year in a house move.
Without Jim, Bev, and Trevor I would never have had the motivation to make hundreds of compilation tapes for them to play on busy Saturday nights having spent my Saturday afternoons combing the second-hand record shops swapping albums in and out so as to avoid unnecessary duplication of songs.
I would not have enjoyed that memorable winter when the snow was so deep none of my group of friends could get to work in our cars so we struggled on foot through the snow to the wine bar every lunchtime where we prayed for the snow to go on so that we could drink beer and eat Jenny’s wonderful chicken and ham pie with potato salad.
None of these memories is of anything that would seem particularly momentous to anyone else but they all live in me as if they just happened last week even though they were nearly forty years ago.
In the centre of them are always Jim, Bev, and Trevor.
A few weeks ago I was driving my daughter to the hospital to see her grandfather just a day or so before he died.
We passed a building in Gillingham which was a restaurant in the 1980s. I think it must have been called “Chaplin’s” or something similar because I remember Bev painting a mural of Charlie Chaplin on the vast back wall.
The people who die drift in and out of our thinking all of the time.
When clients tell me that they are afraid of dying I often ask them what makes them feel afraid.
“I’m just terrified of not existing,” they might say.
But we do exist, whether we are still alive or not.
If there is one truth about death it is that, once you have died, the form and durability of your existence can never again be changed in the hearts of the people who love you.
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