Apparently, it’s approaching that time of the year when we look back, not just at the year that’s coming to an end, but every year. We look back and remember, with fondness, absent family and friends. The passage of time, although not for all of us, helps us remember the good times and not just what we have lost. I appreciate it’s not the same for everyone. I can only write about how it is for me. Older family members and friends who have ‘their time’, so to speak, I find easier, or less difficult, to deal with, especially those who suffered from illness and disease. It is when I look back at those who died far too early I find it much harder.
2022 was a grim year, as many years are as you grow older. Not only do you lose grandparents and parents, you lose siblings and friends, some of whom were younger than you. I went to three funerals in 2022, none of which were religious and all of which turned into celebrations of good lives, well lived. And yet, and yet.
With all of them, there were what ifs and if onlys, as well as one days. Two were many years away from retirement and one pretty well there, but those future plans they had spend a working lifetime planning turned to dust, one in a heartbeat. The deaths led me to reconsider everything in my life. There remain so many things I want to do, places I want to see, family and friends I need to meet and if I carried on the way I was, time would run out too soon.
That ADHD assessment, that difficult second book, that visit to Canada to see my beloved relatives, places I so want to see, planes I want to fly on, golf courses I want to play – Jesus, the more I think about it, the more things there are. Having quit the world of full time work nine years before becoming a pensioner was the smartest move I ever made in a life of anything but smart moves. If I had stayed in the workplace, I’d have had nine years less of doing the things I would otherwise have done when I was getting too old to do them. And who knows what ghastly diseases and conditions lie around the corner? I knew when I took the decision to settle for a lot less money, my life would be considerably more valuable and so it has been. The thought of looking back on years when I stayed in work when I could have set myself free would have been too much to bear.
What we do with our time is of course up to us and I won’t dare to say what’s a waste of time for me isn’t fulfilment for someone else. I made an unconscious decision to scale back my TV viewing because I could write, read and do more. My life which during Covid became a nightly series of Box Sets was fun in some ways, but a terrible waste in others. Now, when social media friends ask for suggestions of which Box Set to watch next, I think to myself, “Do something else. You will have enough time to veg out on nothing but television if you reach old age, with that increasing infirmity.” That feeling was only reinforced during my jobs in the third sector where television was all there was. If there was a God, many of them would be waiting for him while they watched Holly and Phil and Homes Under The Hammer. Imagine being on that death bed thinking, “Well, that life was so good and only made better by watching hundreds of episodes of Bargain Hunt.” I don’t even look at TV schedules these days, so I may be missing stuff I’d probably like, but give me a walk in the woods or by the sea shore or even at the train station – actually, not even an even at the train station: that’s a big one for me – any day of the week.
We are here for a reason: to procreate. That’s the only reason. And we are the lucky ones. The odds against us being born are, to quote Professor Richard Dawkins, stupefying. It seems so unfair that not all of us will make it into old age, or any ‘good’ age at all. But fairness doesn’t come into it.
I’m definitely looking back as this year comes to an end. How could I not? But I also know that the future is unwritten for me as it is for you. I am heartbroken for the families of those we have lost these days, as I am of course for those who died, often so young. There is no reason I won’t be next. Best do a lot of things I want to do. Box Sets can wait.
