How Not to Die Alone

by Richard Roper

I’m actually on a diet anyway. It’s the one where you eat an entire wheel of brie and then have a bit of a cry. You know the one?”

Because, as Andrew had discovered, once you’ve smelled death it never leaves you.

The truth was that it had made him see that everyone who died alone had their own version of that chair. Some drama or other, no matter how mundane the rest of their existence was. And the idea that they’d not have someone there to be with them at the end, to acknowledge that they’d been a person in the world who’d suffered and loved and all the rest of it—he just couldn’t bear the thought of it.

But as the years went by, their reminiscing became forced, a desperate attempt to keep alive a connection that seemed to diminish every time they spoke.

People think loss is the same for everyone, but it’s different in every case, you know?”

die: if I could just accept the ending’s coming, then I could concentrate on enjoying the rest of the song so much more.”

Being silent during meals was for married couples on holiday in brightly lit tavernas with only their mutual resentment of each other left in common.

he might not know what the future held—pain and loneliness and fear might still yet grind him into dust—but simply feeling the possibility that things could change for him was a start, like feeling the first hint of warmth from kindling rubbed together, the first wisp of smoke.

How many thousands of other people, in fact, might at that very moment be about to open the door to a house where the last occupant had died and rotted without anybody noticing.

Up to that point I’d never realized that life, just sometimes, can be wonderfully, beautifully simple. I only wish I’d remembered that after you’d gone.”