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A Celebration of the Banal
Contemplating Mortality. Maybe.
The dog woke me at a quarter to five.
He’s supposed to do that. But it’s not like I always appreciate it.
I let him out into the yard and start the coffee machine. I pour a cup of dog food into the maze dish for him to root around in later. I fill the water dish. And I whistle for him to come in.
Fresh coffee. Flipping on the timer to write before breakfast. A chain of habits. How the days pass.
On the train yesterday, I chatted with a colleague. He asked me if I think about dying much.
He’s a year older than I am. Not that you’d believe that. I touch my turkey neck before I am conscious of reaching for it.
I tell him about B., and how death has been on my mind so very much. “No,” he says. “Your own mortality”. He talks about getting older. Thinning hair. Aches. Losses. Somehow he rather quickly circles back to someone else’s death, too. His mother is well at the moment, he says, but there is the inevitable: Death as it happens to someone else. Death in the abstract.
I think there’s a big (culturally constructed) difference between contemplating one’s own aging and contemplating one’s own death. Or perhaps not. Not culturally constructed, I mean. If death stops all…
