{"id":21657,"date":"2026-02-11T20:05:33","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T01:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21657"},"modified":"2026-02-11T20:05:33","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T01:05:33","slug":"inanities-of-mortality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21657","title":{"rendered":"Inanities of mortality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Photo credit: Fey Marin. Unsplash license.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Somebody said<\/strong> that we don\u2019t know what we\u2019re thinking until we write it down. Like most aphorisms, it\u2019s probably only true in limited cases. But I want to think this thing through, and you\u2019re my designated victims<\/s> audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I\u2019ve had on my mind of late is death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not, I hasten to add, my way of easing into grave news. There is no grave news. I\u2019m doing okay, health-wise, for an old fat man, as my doctor told me a few weeks ago (I think those were his exact words).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there\u2019s been a lot of death in my life of late. I lost a friend in December, and another in January. Now one of the men in my Bible study group at church is in hospice; we went to see him Monday night. We\u2019ll likely never see him again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also I lost an uncle last month. And another friend died earlier last year. (That one was complicated. We\u2019d been very close at one time, but over the years he changed his opinions, and I felt he was using me more and more as an ideological punching bag. So I broke it off. Then word came that he was dying, and I agreed to one last phone call. It was civil, I left him with God\u2019s blessing, and a couple days later he was gone. I\u2019m sure I could have handled it better, but handling things badly is sort of my personal style.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it\u2019s probably not surprising that I\u2019ve had death on my mind. I\u2019m disappointed to find that I\u2019m not properly resigned yet to my mortality. I honestly thought I was. I assumed (perhaps judgmentally) that those intense people who live their lives with gusto were probably in denial. But I\u2019ve always lived carefully. Measured out my life in coffee spoons. I have looked on the dark side. Gazed into the abyss. The Roman emperors, I seem to recall, had a slave who followed them about, muttering, \u201cRemember, Caesar, thou art mortal.\u201d I fulfilled that function for myself. \u201cRemember, it can always get worse, and probably will,\u201d has been my slogan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet I find myself resistant to assimilating the fact that I\u2019m in my 70s, approaching the actuarial horizon for most of my family. I had a vague idea, I think, that I\u2019d probably drop dead after I finished the Erling books, like Pres. Grant, who finished his autobiography <\/a>(which paid off his debts) just days before dying of cancer. (It\u2019s a good book, too. Very succinct and efficient in style. He wrote like he fought. You\u2019d almost think it was written post-Hemingway.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here I am, my great project completed, trying to find a way forward with an even more ambitious (but hopefully shorter) work. I\u2019m planning as if I\u2019ll live forever. Caesar\u2019s slave whispers to me, and I give him an elbow in the gut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am, in short, in denial. That offends my sense of myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the one hand, the Bible tells us to number our days. On the other, we\u2019re told to cast no thought on the morrow. Am I living my best life, looking on the bright side? Or am I deluding myself?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have no internal instrument for judging this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I suppose I could pray about it, but that sounds kind of extreme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Somebody said that we don\u2019t know what we\u2019re thinking until we write it down. Like most aphorisms, it\u2019s probably only true in limited cases. But I want to think this thing through, and you\u2019re my designated victims audience. What I\u2019ve had on my mind of late is death. This is not, I hasten to add, … Continue reading Inanities of mortality<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[709],"class_list":["post-21657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","tag-death"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21657"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21660,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21657\/revisions\/21660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}