With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial

by Kathryn Mannix

There are only two days with fewer than twenty-four hours in each lifetime, sitting like bookends astride our lives: one is celebrated every year, yet it is the other that makes us see living as precious.

women on the production line twisted the detonator wires of occasional bombs in the hope that civilian lives in Germany would be spared; and then returned to her inner-city home through which an unexploded German incendiary bomb had dropped, its own detonator inactive thanks to unknown sisters in Germany.

This is the Kingdom of the Dead, and it is a place of dedicated kindness.

Our elderly are so easily dispossessed, stripped of their personhood by eyes like mine too young to value their accumulated wisdom, experience and patience.

These people change the centre of their world from self to others. They focus on loving their loved ones, but that kindness also beams onto everyone else around them – their fellow patients in hospital or hospice, and all of us who care for them.

Of course it always seems that the best people are dying. These are just ordinary people, like the rest of us, but they are at an extraordinary place in their life journey, and all of us benefit from their compassion.

they are examples of what we can all become: beacons of compassion, living in the moment, looking backwards with gratitude and forgiveness, and focused on the simple things that really matter.

immortality is recognised as a poisoned chalice.