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100 Things I’ll Miss When I’m Dead
How dreadfully dull measuring a life in years. We should instead calculate our age by our number of smiles, total decibels of laughter, the volume of tears, pages read in books, the collective light intensity of sunsets and sunrises witnessed, times our hearts were broken and fixed, our kisses, orgasms, hangovers, awe-inspiring views.
Oh yeah… by the way… we’re all going to die.
I was first shocked by the prospect of death at the age of sixteen. I had hungrily consumed the complete works of Ernest Hemingway over a period of a few months after first discovering his writing. I would hand in one book at the library and loan the next until I was done. I then discovered a biography of the man’s life and set out to explore this character that was already leaving an indelible impression on me.
I revelled in the tales of his life but I had no idea what was coming. Even now I remember with alarming clarity what it was like to read that he had killed himself back in 1961. Took his favourite shotgun, placed his forehead against the barrel and blew his head off. Given his date of birth, I had assumed he was long dead by the time I started reading him in 1984 but this revelation rocked me to the core. I was thrust into a lifelong contemplation of death and a relentless fear of it.
