to die, to live each day

After his recent death from Alzheimer's Disease, I rewatched Terry Pratchett's Dimbleby lecture called Shaking Hands With Death. In it he makes the argument for Assisted Dying. I'm not going to go in to the arguments here, but there was one thing he said that really struck home. Well there were two things..

The first one was about his father's slow and painful decline into death. Not long before he finally passed away he suddenly sat upright and cried

- I can feel the sun of India on my face !

I found this outburst incredibly moving. This sudden surge of a sense memory from when he was happy. Something about the phrase speaks of his personal paradise. And it came to him while he was leaving life.
It seems almost perverse that the things in life that nourish us, memories that we cherish should seem the more precious and vivid when they are about to be lost. This brings me to the second thing that was said.

Pratchett wanted the right to choose a good death. When he still had enough of his mental faculties to essentially still be of himself and able to make a decision to leave life in a dignified and pleasurable way.
He goes into some of his arguments for this and the thing he said that gave me goosebumps was about imagining you could chose to die any day of your choosing. Each day you awoke you could decide to die that day.
Imagine, he said, how much more vivid and rich life would become. When we have a sense of death then life reveals itself in its profound mystery and beauty.

And so, it is this that moved me. We live lives that seem eternal. We get bored by the routine of day after day o'clock. But if we could really get a sense of 'I might just die today' then the complexion of the day would become profound and achingly beautiful. No longer the drone of days, but a wonderland that seeps into the soul and resonates. We need to feel death's imminence to feel life's supreme gift to us. And, because our lives are actually miniscule in cosmic time it gives them weight and value. 24 carat lives, utterly priceless because they are finite and unique.