Friday 29 June 2012

Memento mori

‘Daddy, when do you want to die?’

Momentarily winded, I surreptitiously checked that the eight-year-old’s head was not revolving through 360 degrees, her eyes were not spitting red fire. ‘Er, well, I don’t really want to think about it’ I answered, lamely.

She insisted. ‘All right, then: when I’m 86.’

‘No, I mean what day? I want to die on a Tuesday.’

I shouldn’t be surprised. We used to live in a house next to a cemetery – a beautiful Victorian one, with cedar trees and stone angels and a chapel. The Daughter loved to say goodnight to the angels she could see from her bedroom window. She learnt to walk tottering through the gravestones. Her first taste of freedom was speeding her tricycle through the yews and along the path to the cremation plots.

Now she likes filching a glass chipping or two off the odd grave; blue ones are her favourite, being rarer than green. ‘I hope blue ones are still in fashion when I get to be buried,’ she says.

It’s no use being shocked: most children seem to be fascinated by the macabre and are entirely open in their curiosity about death. So as long as it doesn’t tip over into morbidity, I’ll go with the flow. But I still don’t know why she’s chosen Tuesday.

6 comments:

  1. I don't know why she chose Tuesday either. I'd much enter eternal rest on a Monday morning when everyone else is toiling to work.

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    1. I was thinking a Sunday, to round off the week nicely, but then realised I'd have to confront my Maker just after not having concentrated properly in church.

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  2. Wednesday for me. Born on a Wednesday so has a certain symmetry! Not considered til just now tho...

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    1. Yes, that would work. But I think I was born on a Thursday, which would be a bad day to die because it would mean missing Country House Rescue. Thanks for commenting!

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  3. Surely Tuesday is the worst day of the week. That's when I would go.

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    1. That's very decisive. I'd quite like to go on a day everyone likes, because then it would be clouded for them ever after and they'd think of me at least once a week. Saturday, I suppose. And it would get me out of a day's childcare.

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