Love your sister

Love Your Sister: A Brother’s Like Tick

So advised Samuel Johnson in his book Love Your Sister. My younger sister Julie is not dying of a terminal illness as his was. She is, however, going to die and has decided to stare down that unknown date by accepting its inevitability and engaging positively with the world while time permits. Hence her blog is called Countdown as she draws down from 90 years.

This perspective gels with my own thoughts on longevity and mortality. I struggle to understand why so many engage in denial and delusion about finity and consider it impolite to regard someone at 90 to be no closer to death than another at age 20. This denial is usually closely followed and deflected by declarations that said 20 year old might be hit by a bus anytime. While true, probability demands a more realistic assessment of life chances.

If you are curious to access her blogsite you will note one of her status descriptors as grandmother. Do not dismiss this lightly with the common expectation that you will read folksy dotings. Grandparents have a more nuanced perspective to share and a stockpiled quantum of love to distribute; their words merit active listening.

As one drawn to philosophy myself in later life, I was interested to read an article by Prof Simon Critchley recently in which he claims in the title “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” He sets out his views in the context of coronavirus and imposed isolation and its attendant anxiety and fear. Death is not a surprise interruption to our lifelong narrative as it comes for all of us. It can be imminent for some and capricious for others. But it is reliable.

I think what my sister is doing is ensuring she leaves behind a quantum of love that feeds and infuses the generations to follow. None is wasted and its productivity is immense. The parents we shared left that for us. Critchley reminds us that “a life lived well, a philosophical life, is one that welcomes death’s approach.” Normality, he suggests, encourages us to live a “counterfeit eternity” as we pretend life will go on and death just happens to others.

Prof Critchley has provided for me what I believe is the nub of Julie’s intention for her Countdown blog: “pulling away from the death-denying habits of normal life and facing the anxiety of the situation with a clear-eyed courage and sober realism.”

In the midst of some very jaundiced and poor thinking we are urged to think well. To think with integrity and good faith. Some shun thinking when it interferes with their fixed-form ideology and tribal membership. Some think poorly and disingenuously. Others, like Trump, don’t think at all and are untroubled by erudition.

As so often said, none of us are perfect. We all have some abrasive, echidna spikes or messy iron filings or burrs adhering to us. But we can put away the rasp and chisel and just admire the humanity of grandparents who have come so far. So here’s to thinking well. Countdown? I get it!