Lessons

by Ian McEwan

The self-made hell was an interesting construct. Nobody escaped making one, at least one, in a lifetime. Some lives were nothing but.

You buried your parents, or they buried you and grieved more piteously than you ever could for them. There was no greater affliction than losing a child. So count yourself and your father lucky.

He remembered his parents well enough at his age now. From then onwards nothing changed for them apart from physical decline and illness.

How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He had never made an important decision. Except

To most people, including himself, life just happened.

The vicar began her welcome. Impossible not to stare at the coffin where Rosalind lay in the dark. But she wasn’t there, or anywhere, and here it was again, the simplest feature of death, always startling – absence.

Falling, in showers, out of bathtubs, on pavements, over carpet edges, off buses, down slopes was how many among the old started to die.

A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson.