DEATH

Life is such a cliché.

Staring out the window at the rain, the bus trundles along and I’m wondering what a praying mantis is praying for (more bugs to eat, probably), when the driver hammers the breaks and stops an ant’s ballhair away from someone’s grandma.

She only realises this when the glass wall of the windscreen is towering over her. She hobbles across the road and when we pull away I see her leaning against a telephone pole, panting from the shock of it all.

Of course, my first thought was: Holy shit! But then I remembered the old chestnut: You never know, you could cross the road and get hit by a bus tomorrow.

Then I started thinking about the stats for such a death. For all the talk of getting hit by a bus, how many people actually do? Maybe a more clichéd end would be ‘heart attack from overwork’ or ‘died in his sleep from old age’.

Maybe they should say: Appreciate your life, because tomorrow you could cultivate a heroin addiction and end up lying in a shopping mall toilet with a needle sticking out your arm.

This is probably more likely than getting hit by a bus.

It seems like there are only two ways people want to die. One is quietly in their sleep, the other is in a rip-roaring blaze of glory – blown up rescuing a kitten or something.

It seems that death is a cliché too.

I can see the appeal of the ‘quietly in my sleep’ death. It’s painless, I suppose, but I think this way would cause much more aggravation than, say, being held hostage in a Speed-style elevator situation.

Imagine the conversations downstairs on the day of your demise: “Bloody hell, Nathan’s having a bit of a lie-in… we were supposed to take the grandkids to the Frisbee-a-thon!”

And then after you’ve been discovered as a soulless, empty husk: “Oh no, his coffee’s gone cold… and he’s shit the bed!”

I think the ‘blaze of glory’ thing implies death at a young age; you don’t really imagine senior citizens machine-gunning aliens and staying behind to self-destruct the mothership while everyone else legs it.

It’s not the kind of conversation anyone really wants when they’re hosting a dinner party, but it should be. Then you’d realise that no one chooses the middle ground and says, “I’d like to cross the road one day and get hit by a bus.”

…

In ‘The Tibetan Art of Living and Dying’ it says that “you cannot live [properly] until you have learnt how to die”. It encourages people to not steer away from thoughts of death, but to realise that one day you will die and live your life accordingly.

For every big decision I have to make, after trying to imagine what my dad would say about it, I try to think about how I’d feel about this choice when I’m smelly and crusty and about to croak.

Another book that I haven’t read but I’ve read about, written by a nurse who interviewed a lot of seniors on their deathbeds, apparently says that most people say they wished they’d worked less and spent more time at home with the family.

It seems so simple it’s almost an anti-climax – not: “I wish I’d spent more time at the pub” or “in front of my X-Box”, but “at home with the brats and missus”.

So instead of thinking about if your death will be painless and silent or noisy and action-packed, just think about one day not being around and leaving the world with the ripples of your existence.

Then your life spent trying to conform or striving to be a non-conformist (the same thing, really) wouldn’t be such a cliché.