I am sat in my home office, thinking about. Thinking about my death. I am not fearful. That is not because I can sense the warmth of heaven's light just beyond the veil. I'm not sure why it is. When I was in my twenties the thought of death would sometimes chase away sleep. I'd lie restless with panic at the thought of annihilation. What scared me was not nothingness but the thought of the world simply carrying on without me being there to see it. It was not that my ego required the sun not to rise, I was desperate to be part of existence. In my twenties, life was a thing of the future. The thought of my life being a thing of the past staggered me.
Why am I not scared now? Perhaps because the future belongs to my children. Throughout my life my back has strained and cracked as I have dragged with me the knot and tangle of my childhood. My father's death snagged and tore away some of that. Now, I worry, I am weighing my daughters down with my expectations, imperfections and frustrations. It's right that we slip overboard and fall into the wake.
As I look around me, I find myself thinking that I have a lot of possessions. A lot of what is on my shelves has sentimental value, but only to me. I have been building a museum of me where I am both the curator and the only possible visitor. It's not because I want to be "remembered". It is, I am amazed to realise, that I have been planning a time when I will conscientiously remember myself. I have books I will never re-read and whose contents I have forgotten, but which I have, sub-consciously, imagined I would one day take from the shelf in the hope of finding a piece of myself, a memory of a time (even if only a moment), inside it. I have a copy of every edition of the law book I have edited. I have the weak excuse that I may need to know how the law stood in a particular year, but they are really exhibits in the dusty cabinet of auto-curiosity.
In such years as are left to come to me, I would like to be an explorer and not a collector.