Talk One

Sex or Death?

Every five minutes most men think about sex. I think about Death.

First of all, I wonder what happened to the characters of the two people whose waxy corpses I have seen in the flesh. One of them said to me, one Friday night, ‘I’ll see you on Monday’, then didn’t, and the other one went her way with the words ‘Isn’t it time your were in bed?’

The first (my best friend) ended up as a jar of ashes in a Gloucestershire garden, and the second (my mother) is decomposing in a hole in Devon.

And second, I wonder what will be the cause of my departure, whether I will copy friends and family who have already blazed a trail. Will my heart burst one Sunday playing with two small children when a hospital has told me, the day before, the pains in my chest mean nothing? Will I contract cancer and tell no one until I have two weeks left, for fear of worrying those I love? Will I get engaged to the love of my life then have a head-on collision with a pensioner blinded by the low sun over a frosty Cotswold lane? Or will I step in front of a truck on the M5 at dawn one Saturday because I cannot face going back to work?

Whatever the method of my extinction it will, no doubt, be unspectacular. The demise of most is by mundane means. I doubt I will blow myself up in a busy shopping mall or go in a hail of bullets on a causeway or lose my head to a sheet of glass slipping from a lorry’s loose load, or even exit pursued by a bear. No. My life is so comfortable my closure is bound to be morphine-blurred – more statistic than fantastic.

Third, I meditate on the character of Death itself. Is it really some thin bloke with no sense of humour who broods over a pint in a country pub with a cloak that went out with Walter Scott and gardening equipment stolen from a horticultural museum? Or is he a randy skeleton cavorting like a weekend drunk behind the backs of the smug rich in crowns and robes, complete with hourglass as handy symbolic prop? Or is Death a valley into which men ride recklessly, caring more for puerile notions of Tom Brown heroism than common sense? Is it a shadow that passes over like clouds that drop the temperature ten degrees when you’ve settled down with a fruity cocktail to the best spot on the beach? Or is it the awfully big adventure that starts when you land in an undiscovered country? That would be nice. Or perhaps it’s a sleek deadly creature, black and yellow with a slim waist and twitching antennae or long and smooth and green but concealing a fatal sting? Is it a mirror in which we view our life’s moral accomplishments, or lack of them? Or a leveller that means Gove, Musk, Prince Andrew and Brad all end up in the same pit? Is it a physician? A copper with a palm on the shoulder? Does it have jaws? A thousand doors?

And I wonder where I will go when this random concatenation of molecules that is my body has dispersed. Will there really be a kind old man with a white beard lolling on a chaise longue with an ever-replenishing bunch of grapes and brilliant ideas, like a repressed but inspirational grandpa, about how to pass the time? Or will there be just fiery floods and thicked-ribbed ice, as terrified Claudio speculates when he is measured and found wanting? And what’s all this stuff about virgins?

When I have wondered where dead friends and family have gone, how I will die myself, whether Death is really a bloke and whether I am going to think and feel on the other side, I marvel at the millions and millions of words already been spent on the subject by otherwise brilliant people whose brains, when they contemplate Death, turn to mush.

According to my hero, Mark Twain, Adam brought Death into the world and we should all be grateful. Thanks, Mark. Antony, of Cleopatra fame, promised to be a bridegroom in his death and run to it as to a lover’s bed. Okay. Dylan Thomas glibly observed that after the first death there is no other, then drank himself to death. And Gerard Manley Hopkins bleakly posited that all life death does end and each day dies with sleep. The cheeky Samuel Beckett wryly observed, ‘If I was dead, I wouldn’t know I was dead. That’s the only thing I have against death’, which doesn’t really mean anything at all, and his quipping forerunner, one Oscar Wilde, blew the whole thing out of the water with the remarkably unremarkable observation that Death is a scientific fact. Sam Shepherd, another wag on a bad day, followed this up with the killing quip, ‘When you die it is the end of your life’, which is marginally more fatuous than Hazlitt’s ‘Death cancels everything’ or Tennyson’s resounding ‘Death closes all.’ Even the genius of geniuses, George Eliot, piously opined that our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them. Luckily for her she wrote Middlemarch. And guess who said that if a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live – Martin Luther King. Don’t get me started on Hamlet. Or the Bible.

The truth is that when you grasp how much time, energy and words have been used up contemplating the nature of something that is by its very nature more absence than presence, you can only agree with Abraham Lincoln that ‘If I am killed, I can die but once, but to live in constant dread of it is to die over and over again’, and you can only conclude that the coward dies a thousand deaths and the brave man only one.

So I have decided to be brave and, like a smug bridegroom, think about sex. After all, the wisest thing I ever heard on the subject of death was uttered by a chain-smoking, skinhead Roman Catholic priest in the only sermon I can remember after 15 years of going to his church every Sunday.

He approached the lectern, crossed himself, and said, ‘We should love each other because we are all going to die.’