In a newspaper interview with the actor Tim Roth, there is a tragic and moving section which refers to the death of his son Cormac from cancer at the age of 25. Following his death, Roth and his wife Nikki Butler quoted one of Cormac’s mottoes: “Make sure you do the things you love.” In what has so far been a deeply troubling year for my family and so many of my friends, a year of premature loss and heartbreak, those words mean more to me than ever before.
This, my loyal reader will know, is not exactly a new or original theme in this blog. I am not unaware that I am hurtling towards my own demise at a rapid rate of knots, having long ago abandoned the misplaced assertion of my youth that somehow I might be the one to live forever. 2025, and we are not even five months in yet, has so far been a year of unremitting gloom.
As well as the loss of my beloved sister-in-law in the recent Vancouver drive-killings, I have lost three friends of a combined 150 years. Obviously, my loss is but nothing compared to their close families but knowing that doesn’t make things any easier.
The loss is there in surviving emails, texts and messages and I remember where I was and what I was doing, although none of the dates, when the news came through. And the loss is always there when I think of something, think of sharing a thought with them, as I often did, then remembering they aren’t there anymore.
I have tried to retain perspective. My loss is bad enough, but not so bad as the life curtailed, a life still full of possibilities, of ambitions achieved, of bucket-list items done. It all seems so unfair, until you realise that fairness doesn’t really come into it. Once you accept, as I did long ago, that everything doesn’t happen for a reason, that there is no supernatural creator directing our lives and, crucially, that we are only here at all, defying almost impossible odds, by the accident of our birth. We are the lucky ones. The trouble is that in 2025 it doesn’t feel that way.
More and more, I am deciding to do the things I want to do and not endlessly postpone them to ‘someday’, because someday never comes. I am a classic leave-it-to-tomorrow person, but more and more I am not waiting until tomorrow. If I can afford to do something I want to do, or buy something I want to buy or to be with someone I want to be with, then tomorrow can’t wait. I do not wish to stray any further away from loved ones than I need to.
There will come a time, assuming I live that long, where it will be physically, and who knows mentally, impossible to do the things I want to do. I know plenty of people who talked about achieving an ambition “one day” and, more specifically, after they retire from work without thinking it through. The lines and decline of age are very real. That long drive from England to, say, Italy or Greece, might feel doable now, but what happens when your arthritic hips and knees, along with a general physical decline, tell you otherwise? Sooner or later, you may find yourself silently watching Homes Under The Hammer and Bargain Hunt and able to do little else. And that’s if you live long enough.
Cormac Roth was certainly onto something when he said: “Make sure you do the things you love.” And I’ll simply add: do the things you love with those you love and keep them close to you whenever you can. We don’t, unfortunately, live forever, and won’t, so far as I am concerned, survive our own deaths and meet up again in Heaven (or Hell). If you have faith that God is waiting for you at the end of your Earth life, then why not adopt Cormac Roth’s philosophy anyway? You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
