Written March 2020
My chances of living to see out the summer depend entirely on other people acting in a socially responsible manner with care and consideration for others, and them having at least enough basic intelligence to understand and follow simple instructions. I thought my chances were quite good, or at least good enough to be hopeful. Then I saw people posting dumb shit like this and, at that moment I realised, I’m dead, aren’t I?
I have Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). It’s a progressive and almost invariably fatal (almost? Well, you might get run over by a bus before the COPD kills you, after all) condition, for which there is no treatment other than trying, ultimately in vain, to delay slightly it’s inevitable, rather unpleasant, end.
Not that I’m complaining or trying to elicit sympathy. For one thing, it’s entirely my own fault – not only how I came to contract it, but also how little I’ve done to mitigate its progress. So I cannot feel hard done by. I’ve also come to almost accept my fate, adjust to my new limited prospects, with as much of a positive attitude as I can muster. And I think I’ve been doing quite a good job at this ‘awfully big adventure‘ as Peter Pan described it.* I bitterly miss my ability to get out in nature; 2 or 3 hours steaming up and down hills in the soft deciduous woods of the southern English countryside was my almost daily routine, and one to which I’ve always attributed what little sanity and contact with reality I’ve managed to keep. Every day I am poignantly reminded that I will never fulfil my dreams of seeing even a small part of the astonishing beauty of this world, or learn any but the tiniest part of all the wonderful ways in which the universe works, but, on the positive side, you’ll never have to read my novel and I’ll never have to write a follow-up.
But Covid-19 has rather thrown a spanner into the clockwork of my plans, because I’d rather assumed that I had at least another 4 or 5 years before I died from either a carelessly contracted cold leading to pneumonia, or, more likely, made my own quietus when my condition deteriorated enough to make my life a joyless and wearisome burden.
However, should I contract the virus, and there seems little prospect of avoiding it, I will very likely not live to see the summer through. Being one of a vast number of people needing scarce-as-hen’s-teeth ultra-intensive medical life support during the upcoming crisis, and being old and sick enough to be a poor bet for survival, I don’t expect to make it through triage. Even with the best medical care it seems that people like me are left with a new, serious, highly disabling reduction in lung capacity. Frankly, such a invalid and restricted life would not be one I’d care to continue.
What really brings tears of frustration and impotent rage to my eyes though, is dying through the lazy ignorance of others. I was going to add stupidity to my tuum culpa
Still, there is a positive aspect to all this; my long-standing depression had been steadily lifting in recent months prior to the emergence of Covid-19, and although the prospect of imminent death has replaced the lassitude and anhedonia I’ve endured for a long, wearisome time, there is something both liberating and, paradoxically, invigorating about my mental state. I haven’t enjoyed the wonderful beauty of the natural world and all its amazing mysteries, so intensely and wholeheartedly for many years.
As the great Dr Johnson put it.
“Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
Life Of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, James Boswell 1791
Memento mori, Dear Reader. Memento mori……
* “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” Peter Pan, J M Barrie 1904.