When I told a friend I had spent the last 18 months reading about death and dying, they asked whether I was having a mid-life crisis. I am not, but it’s a fair question. I’ve been tangentially interested in death and dying since I was an undergraduate student studying comparative religion. All religions posit some kind of afterlife as central to their ethical frameworks and have rituals for the passage to whatever comes next. I find those rituals moving, but as much as I have been open to it, I am unable to believe in the persistence of my ‘soul’ or personhood or consciousness to a transcendental realm or its rebirth into this world again, and am content with the knowledge that death is the end of my physical body, my consciousness and my personal identity. I gain meaning knowing that I will live on in my daughter’s genetic makeup, and for a generation or two longer in the memories of others and in the work I have done.
My dad’s death 20 years ago was transformational in a slow and subtle way and more recently the death of my colleague and friend, Mike Neary, reminded me again about the value of death. In recent months, I’ve started to talk about death and dying, first in a pizza restaurant during the Pint of Science festival in May, and shortly after I wrote this article for our student journalism magazine.
There will be more to come…