Fear of Death

I have now turned eighty and it scares the heck out of me! 

Many of my childhood friends have already passed on, and some of them were a whole lot younger. This makes me feel singularly vulnerable and more apprehensive and miserable because I simply enjoy life and sometimes unconsciously delude myself into believing that I will perhaps live forever. Don’t most of us do?!  I am not, however, easily convinced when my teasing friends remind me that I still have many more fruitful and productive years to go.

They encourage me, tongue-in-cheek, that I look like a sixty-year old and not a day older.  Some of them envy the thick ‘black’ hair on my head that grows as fast as my neighbour’s lawn after a heavy rain. They do not notice the grey hair sneaking out at my parting to remind me that one cannot fool nature.  It sometimes appears that I live in a house with a low ceiling.   They see no age lines on my face and are suspicious that perhaps I go in for regular face lifts which I confess to them I could ill afford. They are aware that I enthusiastically exercise every day trying to keep my incorrigible stomach from hanging over my trousers held up with an exhausted belt and my chest from betraying my sex.  

They have no idea what my health history is like because I am tight lipped about it.  Mind you, I am not in any pain or discomfort of any kind but what they do not know is that I have been a victim of two dismal illnesses one being old age. I had a mild heart attack some twenty years ago and have kept this information close to my chest. The doctor who examined me when I dashed into his office with all the dismal but classical symptoms of a heart attack calmed me down after he checked my blood pressure and found it to be normal.  I was sent home and asked to rest.  A year later, however, it was discovered that I had indeed come down with a heart attack a year earlier and this was picked up by an alert heart specialist. I had half a mind to sue my family doctor for malpractice just so that I could give him a heart attack as well, but then I found that I was just being vindictive and vengeful so, like a good Christian, I forgave him for the lasting scars that he inflicted on my heart.

  Mind you that in spite of these unforeseen setbacks, I have not felt as good as I have in years. Perhaps it is the calm before the storm!!!  However, I am aware that as I feast upon my collection of medications which look more like a home-made pharmacy every single day; and medications consumed at each repast as though it was a heaven-sent dessert, it enables my body to function. But I am also aware that there will come a time when the life of my generous genes, bequeathed to me by my mother, will quit on me and it will be goodbye.  What is most discouraging is that I keep receiving emails from the various community clubs in the city, informing me of the sudden and not so sudden passing of its members.  These emails come in with such alarming and threatening frequency that it is a constant reminder of my own mortality now that it is peeping at me with its tongue sticking out from around the corner.  Most of the deceased passed away between eighty-five and eighty-seven.  This is a source of feverish anxiety for it tells me that I have a maximum of six years to live and that is perhaps being very generous.

Many of my friends who are irreligiously religious and those who are not are instant armchair philosophers.  The religious ones remind me, with heads bowed, that we are all here only to await our ultimate demise so that we could meet our Maker and spend the rest of our days (if days do exist up there) with God.  This also scares me because my faith has not even matched the size of “a mustard seed” which the Bible reminds me is the prerequisite for entering eternal Nirvana.  It is something that I have prayed for all my life, but somehow the “seed” has not germinated fully and needs a whole lot more of potent spiritual fertilizer and serious nurturing.  Those of my friends who are philosophers advise me that if I am afraid that something is going to happen to me chances are that it will.  I have to learn to live life to the leas and hope that when “it” comes it will be sudden and without any warning.
 
I am trying to live my life by psyching death out of my consciousness and I keep telling myself, as do my philosopher friends, that I am not afraid of death, but a stubborn voice invariably takes control and prompts me sometimes  that I should stop kidding myself.  This puts me into a cold sweat even when it is minus thirty centigrade outside.

Most of my funeral plans have been arranged and put in place at a funeral home when the ominous time comes.  I have opted out of a “showing” (you know, when your body is kept out for public viewing at the funeral home, so that all your friends, and those who are at funeral homes by force of habit, can comment on your makeup, the artificial smile on your face done up by skilled makeup artist, and then promptly talk about their fishing trip or indulge in other more juicy local gossip). Since with all the elaborate makeup, I am going to look a lot younger than I do, this will make all my surviving friends a little guilty about their misplaced remarks about my longevity.

I sometimes try to mask my concern about dying by telling myself that my eighty years were perhaps the most interesting years in human history.  I go back to the silent movies and the king of those movies in the form of Charlie Chaplin.  Nobody ever missed the Laurel and Hardy movies and their slap-stick humour.  I was there when cinemascope plunged the world in awe at the wide screen.  I lived through two World Wars and other wars, such as the Vietnam War and the Korean War that were just as devastating to humanity. 
I remember the acquisition of our first radio; its trade mark Grundig, which gave us up-to-date news of events around the world and was the main source of entertainment in most homes.  I witnessed the evolution of the radio into an object no bigger than a wrist watch.    I will not forget the pleasure that we got from a HMV (His Master’s Voice) gramophone, playing those 78 rpm records.  Those gramophones gave us all the exercise we needed for our upper bodies with the constant winding of the instrument to make sure that Doris Day’s voice did not degenerate into a baritone half way through her song.  I also remember the naughty fun that we had making Doris Day deliberately sound as though she was growing an Adam’s apple and how, as children, we could not stop laughing  when she degenerated into a ‘dying man’ half way through the song .  I will not forget the days when the tape recorder made its debut and how we yearned to own one of them if we only had the money.  My one ambition was to own a bicycle.  However a Raleigh bicycle then was a product for kids with rich parents.  Then Japan decided to capture the market by producing a prototype of the Raleigh calling it “the Hopper”.  It was sold for a third the cost of a Raleigh.  Yes, I became a proud owner of a Hopper and remember fondly how I took care of it by painstakingly washing it every day until it sparkled.  

I saw the typewriter go through its remarkable transformation over the years until typewriters were run by electricity and the manual typewriters that we were trained to type on became objects for a museum. Finally, even the electric typewriter became obsolete Those were the days when fountain pens replaced the pen with the “relief nib” which needed to be tirelessly dipped into an ink well while writing and then the page promptly dried off with a blotter.  The ink wells also served a more devious purpose when an ink war was declared in the classroom.

 I also lived through the landing on the moon by Neil Armstrong.  I saw colonies all around the world gain their independence from Britain and was witness to the work of the greats such as Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, President Kennedy,(all deceased during my lifetime) and a medley of great men and women.  I lived through the wretchedness of the likes of Hitler and his Gestapo (designed by Satan himself) and bravely tolerated the privations that most of the world suffered as a result of the brutal wars. I stood in line to obtain rations on a ration card, and viewed standing in those long queues more like a social function to be enjoyed with my friends while the wait went on and on and on.
 
I have lived to see the emergence of religious fundamentalists of different stripes turn the world into a nightmare of intolerance and have created killing fields in the name of the author of peace and love.

I have seen the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the formation of new States so that they could embrace democracy with all its short comings for there was a recognition that it was and will continue to be the only system that assures mankind God-given freedoms that are entrenched in the constitution of so many countries encouraging governments to be people-centric.
 
I experienced the dramatic change in music and saw myself dancing to the waltz and fox trot.  I also clowned around with the Tango. We then moved to rock-and-roll music which was frowned upon by our parents as being uncivilized until President Kennedy gave it some respectability.

I have lived to see technology in communication and other fields take a thrilling renaissance where every field of human activity fell prey to its influence.   The computer made the world a smaller place.  I cannot help thinking of the days when the only way one could get in touch with someone many miles away was to send the individual a telegram.  It also cost a packet to send those telegrams and it shaved quite a bit out of the budgets of big business. I have seen the evolution of the telephone from its origins to the convenience today of carrying it around in one’s pocket in the form of a cell phone and making destinations across the world a few clicks away.  I have been a party to the use of Skype which brings dear ones separated by hundreds of miles right into our living rooms as though they had never left.

Letters mailed in the forties and fifties could be sent either by sea mail or air mail.  Most people opted for sea mail because it was a lot cheaper, but it took ‘centuries’ to reach the addressee. During the war one could never be sure whether the mail would get through or was lying at the bottom of the ocean somewhere.  Today, the only mode that the post office uses is ‘air mail’ but with the competition that the post office is having with the world of computers, the price of mailing letters has become quite prohibitive and bordering on the ridiculous.  I know that the post offices around the world will become extinct before long but I guess I may not live to see that happen.  Perhaps I will!!!

I lived to witness the emancipation of both men and women, but particularly women.  Above all, I followed and saw the convulsions of race relations in the United States and South Africa culminating in the election of America’s first black President Mr. Obama and South Africa’s Mr. Mandela, both iconic figures.

Very early in my life I heard about the “unsinkable” Titanic that went down several years before I was born.  The story was still very fresh in the minds of communities around the world in the thirties.   I also took some comfort that even the Titanic had to die in spite of its sturdy construction that was intended to give it the strength to withstand the harshest forces of nature, even referred to as being “unsinkable,” but was eventually vanquished by a piece of ice.

I also remember the wonderful island of Zanzibar where I grew up and the ever present sense of community and security that it offered. I was in the midst of a bloody Revolution in Uganda when Buganda kingdom was vanquished by the federal forces and was witness to a whole lot of brutality and wanton killings and human degradation.

I recall the happiness of meeting the woman that I was to share the rest of my life with, and the many years of productive hard work and honest companionship that blessed us in keeping the flame burning for the past fifty-five years. 

At University I worked back stage with Cathy Quinn (daughter of Anthony Quinn) and with Rajmohan Gandhi (grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, an Oxonian) on sound and light in the presentation of the play “Space is so Startling”.  The cast was drawn from the university intelligentsia from across Europe. 
 
I have been witness to the dramatic change in air vehicles from their first creation to the supersonic planes that have made air travel so comfortable and convenient.  

I have watched with much interest the change in the educational system from rote learning to scientifically based methods of teaching to optimize learning. 

I remember the more recent emergence of China and India as potential world powers digging themselves out of decades of abject poverty.

I had the privilege of having lunch with Raul Castro, the brother of Fidel Castro, while on a holiday in Cuba at Hotel Marazul, much before he stepped into his brother’s shoes.  I listened to him extol, like a soap-box speaker, the virtues of Communism.  And like a patient political ecumenist I gave him all the attention that he was seeking but never once pointing out to him my observation of the poverty that was rampant in Havana under the system that he was glorifying.  This was a chance encounter with Raul who was known to frequent the hotels to join foreign guests at dinner time apparently to justify the continued entrenched repressive system of government, which will hopefully, sooner rather than later, be relegated to the dustbin of history.

I have been fortunate to travel to many countries and experienced different cultures that have helped me grow
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I saw six prime ministers elected in Canada, all of them with their own agendas and styles of governing.  It took only one Prime Minister in the form of Pierre Elliot Trudeau to make Canada known throughout the world, and he, like Lester B. Pearson, encouraged the opening of the doors for immigrants from what was, and continues to be carelessly referred to as “third world” countries.  A multicultural Canada, blessed by the laws of the land, has made our country the envy of the world, thanks to these two political giants and visionaries.

I have seen the cost of living move up and sometimes wonder whether the price of “gas” here in Canada (petrol in the U.K.) will ever match that of the sixties when a full tank of gas cost only five dollars and an eight cylinder Chevrolet Belair (fully automatic) cost one thousand five hundred dollars only, and was spanking new too.  And we thought that it was far too expensive then!! Perhaps it was, given the prevailing wages which in retrospect somehow had a better purchasing power than does the dollar today.

I lived through the tense moments when President Kennedy almost sparked off a nuclear war that threatened the destruction of the world over Russia’s ambitions to stock pile nuclear weapons in Cuba.

I have watched the payoff that education brought to India, and have been a witness to the demand worldwide for Indian technologists particularly in the I.T. industry. I experienced with compassion the biting poverty in India during the fifties and sixties, and followed its emergence from the ashes of poverty to a bulging middle class that now lives the good life.

I have been a witness to the change in attitudes towards same sex relationships and the “coming out of the closet” of so many celebrated individuals who are now unflinchingly proud to declare to the world about their orientation and continue, as they always did, to contribute to society in a positive way. I have seen marriage viewed with disdain and couples living together rather than obtaining the sanction of the State or Church through marriage.
Above all, I watched the world change from its pristine character, to a world of concrete, most often with very little character, but which is a signal that like human beings themselves, the world will continue to evolve.

The changes that I experienced in the last eighty years are by no means confined to those that have been mentioned above, for my experiences of the many changes have been legion.  These are only a microcosm of my experiences over the last eighty years.  The world has been an interesting and intriguing place “for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel”. My life had a little of both elements making me more human than I imagined.

And if dying is the ultimate end of the sum of all my past experiences, I only hope that when I am laid to rest, it will be with a genuine smile...  not one that is contrived or engineered, but one that will hopefully tell its own story.