There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."
We've just come back from town where we bumped into another elderly couple whom we had befriended quite some time ago during our twice-weekly sessions in the warm-water pool. They hadn't been to the pool for some months now but that's not the reason why we almost didn't recognise them: they looked so much different with their clothes on!
They hadn't been to the pool because he had been undergoing cancer treatment which made him withdraw from his usual activities. Even so, he looked well at 87 years, but he wanted to hear nothing of it. He was starring mortality in the face and felt that life had short-changed him.
Remember that memorable scene in the movie "The Sheltering Sky" (based on Paul Bowles' novel of the same name), where Port says to Kit, "... because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless" ?
We seem to have more and more such encounters with people who, having lived a long and prosperous life, seem to fear death even though it's the natural end to every life, just as birth is the beginning. Perhaps I ought to carry with me a spare copy of Julian Barnes' "Nothing to Be Frightened Of", or its condensed version "Death", to hand out to them.
After all, it's the only thing that binds us all.
