”…Tryna make ends meet, you’re a slave to the money then you die…”

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m on a downer; I’m not, it’s just a coincidence that the things I want to post about at the moment all involve an element of death, which is not a bad thing, as it reminds me to live.

I had never really contemplated my own death until my father passed away in 2013; then I obsessed about it for quite some time. There I was sitting quite happily on my branch in the tree of life when suddenly there was one less person between me and the end; to be fair I was so far along it that it was becoming more of a twig than a branch and had started to bob up and down quite precariously in the breeze. But there’s nothing like the death of someone of a similar age to drum home my own mortality. I had lost friends at university, but I was young then, and whilst the sense of loss was immense, I still felt invincible; those were extraordinary deaths.

Last night my husband told me that an old work colleague of mine had died a couple of weeks ago. I worked with him for seven years; I hadn’t seen him for twenty, yet still the news profoundly affected me. We were more or less the same age and level of qualification; I had previously worked at two law firms before joining the firm where we worked together. He had trained, qualified, and become a partner at that firm, a period spanning 32 years. He had never known any different, had never stepped outside of his comfort zone or worked with new people who may have inspired him or influenced him in different ways. Why not? My husband ventured that maybe he stayed for the money which financed a certain lifestyle and that he was happy with that, with that way of living. That’s true; just because it is a path that I would not have chosen does not make it less valid, and, in this respect, I appreciate that I am lucky in that I have a choice; a lot of people don’t have that luxury.

He would have been earning a fair amount, working incredibly long hours and have been under intense pressure. Was it all worth it? If I had said to him 20 years ago, when we shared the same office in which he would tell me all about his salsa classes, his training for the triathlon he was planning to compete in, or the latest date with his girlfriend, that he had a ticking time bomb inside him which would kill him at the age of 55, would he have made the same choices? Maybe not, but that’s the benefit of hindsight. As Kierkegaard says:

”It is really true what philosophy tells us that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”