How old are you?
How close to death are you?
I’m probably (hopefully) something like half way through my life, and I think sometimes about all the people I know who’ve died already.
Relations of far older generations, some more distant memory than others. People of my parents’ generation, some who dies a while ago, some more recently. Friends, neighbours, employers, acquaintances. Public faces, both famous and infamous.
All people, all animals, all tubes of flesh. All dead, and where they’ve gone we all follow.
Oops, that turned out as little more morbid that I’d intended, and that’s with a fairly dark starting point. But, while I’m here – isn’t it the case? And beyond these people we know, and can identify to some degree, all those who we’ve just heard about, either as individuals (“a death on the line”, “a fatal car crash”, those inconveniences that keep us from getting home on time), groups (victims of bombing in the news, or of outbreaks of disease, or perhaps a plane crash), and then the swathes killed in military actions and atrocities abroad. The million or so murdered in Rwanda.
Each and every one, a person, a life. A fleshy existence doomed to death maybe, but each one with the potential for good things. Each one with love.
There’s nothing that can stop our ultimate fate, but it’s up to us what we do with our lives. There will always be degrees of constraint, even if we can change them a little, but within those constraints we have the choice of how we approach life and death.