Ageing

I turned 40 last autumn. It really doesn't bother me (that much), though I didn't get the same adrenaline rush as when I turned 30, and felt like I was  a grown-up. But that, and my father dying the next month, has made me think a lot recently about the ageing process.

I don't know why it should be, but when I read the papers - which I only really do at the weekends - I am always drawn to the column of birthdays. For some reason, I have a fascination for people's ages, whether it's to tut and say "They look a lot older than that", or to marvel that someone I thought had been dead for years is still plugging on. I felt the same when I heard that Billy Graham, that cheery old anti-semite and con artist, had been gathered unto his imaginary maker at the age of 99. I can't explain this fascination with the inexorable progress of time, but it exists, nonetheless.

I noticed it again today reading the Times magazine, which has an excellent interview with Sir Michael Caine, who will turn 85 later this year. How can that be? How can the star of Zulu, of Alfie, of The IPCRESS File, be not only a pensioner but considerably exceeding life expectancy? Money helps, of course, I suppose, and by all accounts he lives a pretty healthy lifestyle. Fair play to him: not my scene. Better to die in your cups than live on your rations, or something like that.

Anyway, whenever I saw a juicy titbit in the birth columns of the papers, I used to text my Dad. "Can you believe X is Y years old?" He would do the same. We'd also mark deaths in the same way: "RIP James Garner", or whoever it was, especially if they'd reached a ripe old age, or, conversely, had keeled over unexpectedly young.

I now wonder if that was a monstrous act of tactlessness. When my father was - eventually, after a lot of medical shortcomings - diagnosed with multiple myeloma, he knew it would kill him, short of stepping in front of the proverbial bus. My stepmother tells me he didn't want to know the details of how it would end, only whether it would be painful or squalid (answer: probably not). But here was a man in his mid- to late 60s, being confronted with the reality that he had a few years left, and, barring extraordinary luck, not more. No 85th birthday for him.

Should I have stopped with the texts? Were they painful reminders of the mortality which was closing in fast? If I'm honest, and this is shameful, it never crossed my mind. He didn't stop, either: the texts continued to flow. I like to think it was because he didn't like to make a fuss, to make a scene. He would creak and groan sometimes - one of the side effects of multiple myeloma is osteoporosis, and his back and leg gave him pain - but it was always a mutter, never a shout (at least not that I ever saw; I'm sure my stepmother saw much more pain than I did).

Maybe it even helped. I can't tell. We never talked about the end, and he never saw it coming as quickly as it did. Maybe I did the right thing in pursuing service as normal. I do hope I did.

Which brings me back, solipsistically, to myself. Forty years old. Realistically, that's beyond middle age. We're over the hump. The clock is ticking. In his last, heart-rending interview with Jeremy Paxman, when he was undergoing experimental treatment with minimal hope of success, the great Christopher Hitchens was asked if he was afraid of death. "No," he said, before qualifying that. He wasn't afraid of death: if you're as convinced an atheist as he was, how can you fear the state of simply not being? It would be absurd. What he feared, he said, was a grubby and sordid dying, a very different thing.

(He also, I think, feared a deathbed conversion to some form of theism, which is entirely understandable - think of Voltaire being asked to denounce the Devil and saying "This is no time to be making new enemies!" - but would have been anathema to his thinking, living self. Still, he was alive to the potential weakness, and explained it to Paxman.)

My father's death was the first I have ever witnessed, and I suppose it won't be the last, if I am spared. I still have a parent and two step-parents, whom I wish long and happy lives, as well as a step-grandmother. It will probably happen again.

Where is all this leading me? Maybe nowhere. Short of a trip to Dignitas - euthanasia can wait for another day - we can't choose the time or, to an extent, the manner of our passing, though I think UK doctors are still allowed to administer medication under the umbrella of the 'double effect' rule; that is, you know it will kill, but that is not the primary intention. Medical ethicists can correct me on that if I'm wrong.

I suppose the lesson for today is this: do things now. Because you never know. I had a dearly beloved colleague in the Commons who succumbed to cancer at (I think) 33. She was the brightest of bright sparks, a music DPhil and a brilliant clerk, who could do anything. I regret with all my heart that I didn't see enough of her when she was in what turned out to be her last days, but I can say I danced at her wedding. I think, often, of what she might have achieved, how her life with her husband might have turned out. Don't put things off. Carpe diem, as Robin Williams famously intones in Dead Poets' Society. Because you just never know.