On Being a Memory.

Four and a half years ago a consultant urologist told me that I had a cancer in one of my kidneys. He recommended removing the stricken organ because, he said, chemotherapy is generally ineffective with kidney cancers, and so I asked him what would happen if I declined surgery. He told me that the cancer would grow and I would be dead in around two years. I agreed to have the operation.

This much is old news, but what’s new is the sudden shift in my perception of how this relates to the here and now. You see, when the choice of action concerns the prospect of something dramatic happening in the future – in this case death, the big break-off point, the change from a state of being to some kind of non-being – the focus of attention is on the event itself. ‘I will die soon if I don’t have this operation.’

But it occasionally strikes me that if I’d made a different decision, the event would have occurred by now. I would have died around 2-2½ years ago, and that means that, as far as anyone who knew me and is still alive is concerned, I would now be a distant memory. And the thought of being a distant memory, instead of a material being functioning in a material universe, seems somehow more profound than the transition from being alive to not being alive. So that has now become the focus of attention whenever I’m reminded of mortality.

(Although, purely as an aside, I have to say that every time I read the news in the morning and witness the lamentable standard of those ordering the affairs of us material beings, I do seriously wonder whether I made the right choice.)