Splinters

I’ve always been interested in the idea that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die because, as I see it, if it does, you don’t; you’d just shuttle back and forth between your birth and your impending death forever as replay absorbed replay absorbed replay. Sure, to the casual observer you might be seen to die, to hit that pavement or that car or that internal, biological wall, but your personal time would, like one of Zeno’s arrows, be reduced to infinite splinters, your end unreachable. As a child I thought that this might be what caused déjà vu, and whenever I felt that strange little itch I wondered how many times I’d been through my own story, and whether I’d remember any more next time round.

During my unfortunately prolonged adolescence, as the fear of death that was to gently asphyxiate my life slowly took hold, I yearned for this eternal, purgatorial recapitulation to be our fate, but no such luck. Just before you die – at least where death comes suddenly, inevitably, and gives you just enough time to recognise it – the main sense is of mental paralysis, as if something has thrown you totally off your train of thought. If anything comes to you, it is likely to be supremely trivial; you are much more likely to think of an uncompleted chore or remember something that made you laugh a few weeks before than anything to which you can cling. It is very difficult to get a real hold on the fact that you are about to die, and where you would hope for a memory of your lover or your child or anyone who once mattered to you, you are likely instead to die thinking of nothing much at all.