Everyday Epiphanies, part 423

I've watched every episode of Six Feet Under, and I know that I, all of my family and everyone I know will die, however much I love them. I know, I know, I know it: but I live in denial - I suppose most of us do. As so often, there's that gap between the understanding of the intellect and the emotional understanding and acceptance that you have to have before you really believe something.

There was a piece in the 'family' section of Saturday's Guardian about grief, and specifically about how his grief at his father's death had suddenly struck him while he was driving along in his car months later. The rest of the piece was a series of reflections about 'coming to terms' with the death of your parents, which is something that I find difficult to focus on for too long; it's difficult to think about, and even stranger to write about. I can't concentrate on it for long enough to work out what I think and feel about it. So I guess that means that what I feel about it is fear. I suppose I should think about in a mature, adult way, and try and get past that fear and discomfort...but it doesn't come easily. And I also think that it will happen, and I will feel what I feel about it, and I will deal with it the: so, in a sense, there's no point in trying to think it through beforehand, because your emotional response is unplannable, unknowable in advance.

You might say that it's 'morbid' to think about it, and there's something in that. But I also think that there comes a time when it's so obviously a reality that it's hard not not think about it: I'm sure that every generation has to learn this for themselves - there's no way of being 'told' about it; it's one of those 'intuitive' truths that seeps through you like those waves of shivery feverishness when you have a cold. And then you have that 'felt' truth embedded in you. But you push it away and drift on through your daily rituals and habits, keeping the truth of universal mortality at bay through wilful ignorance, busy-ness and alcohol (or you satiating substance/activity of choice). You nudge up against that truth once in a while, but you push it back into the shadows, where it can't make you sombre or anxious.

You (I) can't live with that knowledge at the forefront of consciousness all the time; if you (I) did, it would induce paralysis.

Life is dangerous, random and contingent. I was reminded of that on my journey to work today. I'd come off the M40 and was driving down the dual carriageway towards the roundabout, in the inside land for the slip road. The traffic was queuing back from the junction, so I was poodling along at a safe distance from the car in front, doing about 20 miles an hour, half-listening to Wogan's reactionary burblings about the insanity of road closures after accidents (or something). Looking in the mirror, I noticed a white-cabbed three and a half ton truck approaching me from behind. Fast. Much too fast to stop. As I watched, I could see that the truck was rocking from side to side under heavy braking, and I thought - what? Probably things like 'shit' and 'fuck' and 'he's going to hit me'. I swerved to the left as far as I could, in towards the grass verge and the metal railing, as close as I could to the car in front, and looked in my mirror: the truck was starting to swerve to the right, out towards the second lane. I looked in the wing mirror, and the truck juddered past in a haze of flying dust, mud and brake smoke. It missed my rear wing by about a foot and a half, but clipped the front-left wing of a car in the outside lane. The truck finally came to a halt fifty yards further down the road, and the fat young driver jumped out and ran back towards the car he'd just hit, and which had stopped amidst its own debris, the driver unbuckling his seat belt as I passed.

I should have stopped as a witness, probably, but I wasn't thinking straight: instead, my flight-or-fight reflex had cut in; as the truck had rattled past me, I'd felt as if all my blood was draining down to my feet - that strange feeling of sudden evacuation, as if you've voided your bowels, and your heart is sinking. The fear gripping you. When I got out of the car in the work car park five minutes later, I was trembling slightly all over, and my voice was shaky as I explained what had happened to a colleague, but there was also the strange feeling of elation, and alertness, and an intense sense of how alive I was. Like I'd awoken suddenly from an habitual dream.

I'm not one for over-dramatising things in a solipsistic way, as you know. But this felt like an epiphany: the wings of the angel of death wafting chilly air past my right ear as the truck bore down on me. If I'd not swerved to the left, if he'd been travelling a bit faster, if he'd left home five seconds earlier that morning...all those tiny contingencies and actions that could have had a very different outcome, and made this my last day. My last morning. My last breakfast. The last time I saw my mum. The last time I went to sleep. The last time I planned to do anything. The last sunrise. We all know that it has to come, but not yet, please. Each day and moment is too precious - if only we could remember that all the time...