Tag Archives: life

[embedded content] Last Friday, I watched my father die. It was the first time I had witnessed death in a human being, though I have seen it in animals. I will never forget what it looked like. The pallor of death is quite different from paleness due to shock or illness. Even before death arrives, the blood drains away from the face as if bleached, leaving behind something more like wax than human flesh. Right up to the end, I knew he could hear. He tried to open his eyes when I spoke to...

“What do they teach them at these schools?” wondered the Professor in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Professor, of course, was concerned about logic. But I wonder too - not about logic, but about maths. Especially among journalists writing about life expectancy and other long-term trends.Here is the FT proclaiming "Average life expectancy falls". This is the headline for a chirpy piece about how reduced life expectancy could make things easier for pension funds...

My mother, Joy Cooke, died last Wednesday, 24th May, at the age of eighty-seven. It was a peaceful end. Beautiful, in a way.Mum had been ill for a long time. She had vascular dementia, triggered by an accidental morphine overdose after an orthopaedic operation in 2013. She also had COPD, brought on by a lifetime of smoking. For the first year of her slide into the oblivion of dementia, she was cared for by my father. But in August 2014, after she became doubly incontinent and both...

This week saw the deaths of the great mathematician John Nash and his wife Alicia in a car crash and the suicide of terminally-ill businessman Jeffrey Spector in Switzerland with the help of Dignitas. This post is written in their memory, and also in memory of my friends and musical colleagues Gavin Williams, who died last week, and Lindsay Purcell, who died at the beginning of April. May they rest in peace. This post is unashamedly long. After all, death is forever. From time...