How old was she?

My mother died recently, unexpectedly. Something that has come up quite often in conversation with people who didn’t know her is to ask hold old she was. I’ve been struck by how important this seems to be to people, to the point where some have asked a second time if I have avoided answering.

I wonder what this could mean about how we respond to a death. Are we trying to orientate ourselves, assess our own proximity to death? Are we gauging how distressing a death might be? Are we considering how much a person could have lived, or what they might miss out on?

Dying ‘young’: the maths

My beginnings in death and dying were in children’s palliative care. Our society seems to keep separate the grief and truth of some people dying when they are days old, four, eleven, seventeen.

If you live in Chad or Lesotho, average life expectancy is 54 years.

Life expectancy in the UK is 78 for men and 82 for women. For every person who lives longer, one will have a shorter life. Half of us will not reach average life expectancy. Further, as healthy life expectancy in the UK is 61 for both men and women, and we witness long and difficult later-life degenerative illnesses, quality of life becomes central.

We can begin to wonder how a number can give a meaningful picture of a person's life or death.

A measure of success?

It may also be fair to say that we consider a long life a successful one. Perhaps some of the experiences we might consider valuable come later on. Perhaps meeting grandchildren or retirement from work. Perhaps we assume that volume of life experience naturally grows wisdom.

Maybe we also link lifestyle with length of life. Whilst there are various choices we could make in how we eat, drink, consume, exercise, work and rest that can affect our health and longevity, the truth is that we have all heard stories of heavy smokers making it past 90, and fit, healthy sportspeople dying in their youth.

Taking care of our bodies, whatever that means to you, can be a beautiful celebration of existing in the world and a good investment in quality of life. Maybe it also gives a sense of control and softens our anxieties around our mortality, and yet it offers no guarantees.

Other approaches to time

On this matter I am deeply grateful to Stephen Levine, an internationally recognised counsellor who has worked extensively with the grieving and terminally ill. In his book, Who Dies? An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying, he talks about the western cultural understanding of time as linear: “The longer the line the more we imagine we have lived, the wholer we suppose ourselves to be, and the less horrendous we imagine the end point”. I wonder whether a sense of injustice around not making it to 78 or 82 might get in the way of us being present in our lives and deaths. And do we unreasonably expect people who do live into their 80s to die quietly?

Levine offers a First Nations idea of a person’s life as a circle which becomes complete around puberty:

“From that time on [a person] is seen as a wholeness that continues to expand outward… Wholeness is not seen as the duration one has lived but rather the fullness with which one enters each complete moment.”

A small but powerful idea that might offer the opportunity to celebrate, value and mourn a life no matter how many years it might last. An idea that might place our own selves right here and right now.

Our teachers

What can we learn from our dead? Each death is unique, as is each life. We do not know how old we will be when we die, nor what we die of, and we have limited influence on those things.

What we do know about and can influence is the quality of our life time, the connections we have and the memories we leave behind. We can choose how we are in the world and how we would like things to be. We can grieve what we lose, and the things that never come to pass. We can rage against the dying of the light, welcome death, be confused, not know the answers and experience your own miraculous life in the fullest, right up until the moment it ends.

There is nothing you can do that will make you more of a person than you are right now, however shining, however flawed. Our mortality has much to teach us, and we can be grateful for those who go before us. Whether we die at 24, 57 or 103 our lives hold meaning.