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Five Years to Live …
Staring death in the face
Last night I lay in bed contemplating how I might die. Will it be bloody and awful — or so swift I’d barely notice. When I was a child I used to wonder about death. I’d face my mortality and found it hard to fathom. Like a mystery — because it is mysterious. None of us knows when or how the end will arrive and none of us — is getting out of here alive.
When I was a little girl I’d marvel at the magnificent size of the universe and know myself to be the tiniest speck. I’d consider the length of history and my own life to be a blip on the timeline. I’d imagine backwards through time to my grandmother and her mother and beyond trying to see what came before me. It is mind-boggling all those ancestors of mine I know nothing about.
My people came on ships with the other early settlers fleeing famine or seduced by the promise of land and a fresh start and much of their stories were left behind. Entire lives full of breakfasts and breastfeeding and arguments and vendettas and betrayals and dancing by candlelight and playing the fiddle in the woolshed, all the bigamy scandals, and babies out of wedlock — lost in time.
They were once alive. Like you are now.
If I belonged to a more intact cultural heritage I might be wiser. If I was an Aborigine, for instance, my lineage…
