By the way... I used to think I’d reach 100--not any more

THIS time of year is a time for reassessment — the short days, the long, dark nights and the cold weather all lend themselves to contemplation, with optimism and forward-planning for the coming year tinged with a need to accept some realities. For me, this has meant a serious rethink. Though I always had every confidence that I would live to see my 100th birthday, my health dramas of the past year or two — namely sarcoidosis (a rare and debilitating lung condition), a detached retina and cataracts — have caused me to reduce my horizon by a decade.

This is little more than educated guesswork, for we ‘know not the day nor the hour’, but it has been a sobering exercise. For assuming I sleep for six hours (if only!) every night, I’ve worked out I have just 150,000 hours left to live, which certainly does concentrate my thinking: not one single hour to be wasted.

I was pondering this when a friend who had heard I was planning to retreat from medical practice in the next year or two said she hoped I’d hidden away a special box of ‘ black tablets’ for when the right moment came. She assumed all doctors did so.

I expressed shock at her suggestion, though the truth of it is, which one of us doesn’t hope to retain control over our lives and our deaths? Especially when we hear so much about the ever thinner line of care in the community, the ghastliness of dementia or whatever form of frailty awaits and the gross indignities to which too many older people are subjected.

And yet, in this era when it is routine for homosexual couples to have babies by sperm donation or surrogacy, when gender reassignment is acceptable even for children and where the green light has been given for drugs to prevent HIV through unprotected sex, the subject of dying ( assisted or otherwise, it will happen to all of us) remains taboo.

Don’t leave it too late to talk about it.