Barrel Strength

Two people I have known died this week, both without warning. One, Doug Aldridge, I have known from Reform days. He had come to Ottawa for a medical appointment, where he had been informed that he was free of cancer. I spoke to him last Firday on the phone. We reminisced and discussed the freedom of speech and the Human Rights Commissions/Levant/Steyn issues. He drove out to see his daughter west of Ottawa on the weekend and was killed in a three-vehicle smash-up on Highway 7 coming back. Bang.

Of Elizabeth deWolfe I know less. She was alive last week and dead this week. She was the sister-in-law of a friend of mine, taught school, did good work, was an admirable person. Both Doug and Elizabeth might have been expected to live for decades more, were they not at the wrong end of the bell curve of mortality.

“Death brings clarity to other judgments”. Thus spoke my friend the Dark Lord as we considered these events. No matter what your problems with your job, your boss, your clients, your wife, your kids, the prospect of death puts them all in the right perspective. “Let death be your adviser” said Don Juan Matus in one of the Cataneda books. “Imagine it sitting on your shoulder, and seek its counsel”, he said. I was in my twenties at the time and felt immortal, but I still recall it. Now I think I understand what the old sorcerer meant.

Calculate the number of weeks you expect to live, as an exercise. If I die between 75 and 85 years of age- may I be so lucky - I will have between a thousand and a thousand six hundred hundred weeks to live. That is a comprehensible number, though it is not as large as one might imagine. My days are numbered. So are yours. Enjoy them. It is all you get in this body, even if you believe we are recycled through other bodies periodically. And if we are not so recycled, it is even more poignant.