No One Gets Out Of Here Alive

Thoughts on the inevitable

If you are young and sensitive and don’t want to think about death, maybe don’t read on.

I’m trying too be as sensitive about the topic as I can, but the bottom line is, whatever else we do with our lives, one thing is certain.

No one gets out of here alive.

When I was an impressionable teenager, I spent a lot of time observing various people I met, particularly older men, in the hope that I would find someone I wanted to emulate.

Someone I could look up to, someone I wanted to be like. We all do it in one way or another, maybe it’s a rock star, a rapper, a sports personality or actor.

It was fairly obvious I wanted some kind of role model to aspire to, but this was back in the 1970’s and there wasn’t the abundance of people we have now busy telling us how great they are and how fantastic their lives are.

I’m talking tawdry, hollow influencers, vile tanned tossers with their stunning lifestyles and beautiful hair endlessly striking the same pose in multiple glamorous locations. Yes, them.

We didn’t have to put up with pricks like that in the 1970’s. I think I may have met people back then who would, had the technology existed, have been ‘influencers.’ 

People who told you how brilliant they were and how I should do the same as them and have an amazing time. We called them wankers. 

Only much later in life did I realise that because I had a fairly difficult relationship with my father I didn’t have someone in my childhood and early adolescence that I wanted to be like.

In fact I did everything I could to be as little like my dad as possible.

(I’m not saying he was a bad man, I was just as much at fault as him, but he wasn’t very good at showing much interest in his offspring.)

So once I was out in the world, I met dozens of weird bullies, meek manipulators, pathetic liars, dangerous drunks, shallow show offs, scared weaklings and terrified muscle bound thugs, and none of them, not one, made me want to be like them.

I had friends who I liked and hung out with, but I never wanted to be like them anyway, that was different. The people I’m talking about were more someone I had a fleeting contact with, someone at a party, in the pub, on a train. I’d look at them, listen to them and then thank my lucky stars I wasn’t like them, or at least I hoped I wasn’t. 

Did I want my hair like that, wear those sort of trousers, sit in that position, nod the way they nodded, hold a cigarette like them, look cool and unaffected by drama like they seemed to be. Would I be happier if I looked more like them, or less like them.

In fact, what I realise now is I spent the majority of the journey to find some kind of identity meeting men I really didn’t want to be like. In a sense I was guided by my dislike, guided by avoidance. They did help in the sense that I was prepared to go a long way not to be anything liken them.

It’s probably the reason we look to rock stars and footballers as role models because they are at a safe distance. If you were to actually meet some gargantuan rock God you’d probably discover they were insecure, neurotic bullies who had very little to admire.

But all that was all a long, long time ago.

Now a lot of my old friends and acquaintances are dying. The topic of death and dying comes into many conversations I have and it’s not something I pursue, it just seems to happen.

And this is not sudden, it’s been a very slow transition over the last decade. I have had friends die since I was a kid and I never really talked about it and certainly didn’t think about it. 

There was a girl in my primary school class who died when I would have been about 8. ‘Susan has gone to heaven’ said our weeping primary school teacher. I don’t know why she died, I was 8, I can’t remember being in the least upset.

A good friend died when we were both 21, that was a shock. He was the first person I knew, my age, who was just suddenly not there any more.

A wonderful young woman I knew well died at 32 years old, that was heartbreaking because she was such a big presence and so full of life. I often think of her to this day and she died 36 years ago.

Chris, a very close friend died when he was 52, my first girlfriend Liz also died at 52, in fact now I ponder this, I knew a remarkable number of people who died in their early 50’s.

I won’t go on with this litany of woe and there is a point to it all.

Basically, I didn’t need to think ‘I don’t want to die like them’ because they were so young and the more it happened the more grateful I became. I knew I didn’t want to die when I was 21, or 32 or 52 but I didn’t need to consider it because I had passed all those ages and was still going.

But now, as more and more friends, acquaintances and just people I’ve met are falling off the perch, I am starting to think about and discuss who I want to die like. Does that sound weird?

It’s a very different experience to looking at another man and wondering if my jeans fit like his, or if I could wear cowboy boots and look as cool as that dude, or should I cut my hair and look more like that artist I met. 

With the youthful search for a role model there is so much hope, so many possibilities, so many comic rejections, and secret admirations. 

Looking for mortality role models is a very different kettle of fish.

Do I want to die of cancer like both my parents did? Well no, not really but that is, statistically probably quite likely.

When I spent time in hospital with my dying mother, there was a woman on the same ward, 10 years older than my mother who had, according to the one of the less than discreet nursing staff, been seriously ill for 20 years. She had been in hospital with a staggering list of medical complaints for as long as any of them could remember, but she was still very much alive and clearly quite a demanding patient.

Do I want to spend my last years like that? Not really.

Do I want to end it all myself, the Dignitas option. I always thought I would until I saw a remarkable documentary in 2011 produced by a friend who I’d met while working on Scrapheap Challenge.

The documentary followed Terry Pratchett, the novelist, who at the time had Alzheimer’s. 

He met various people with incurable diseases and asked them about death and dying. Some wanted to end it all, some wanted to hang on as long as they could.

He then followed a couple who had decided to end it all before the motor neurone disease the husband was suffering from became to severe. He travelled with them to Switzerland and they filmed a man drink a cup of Nembutal, his wife held his hand, he groaned, begged for water and died right in front of your eyes. I found it very distressing, it was all over in 30 seconds but it seemed very brutal.

So I don’t want to do that but I totally understand why some do and I think they should be allowed to under specific conditions.

But the difference is, with all this is I could choose to wear flares or drainpipe jeans in the 1970’s. I could choose to have long or short hair. I could choose to have a 9 to 5 proper job or be a mad thespian with a hand to mouth existence. 

I can’t choose how to die. I will have no choice. Shit will happen in some way or other, and that’s it.

I’m not in the least anxious about being dead, I have zero interest in afterlife speculation, but the transition from the state I’m in as I write this, and the non existence of death is a bit of an approaching challenge that can’t, as far as I understand it, be avoided.

No one gets out of here alive. I kind of love that saying, I’d quite like it on a T shirt.