I can’t remember when I read, or was told, that he considered it a good thing to spend a short time every day thinking about death, thus getting used to its inevitability and coming to understand that something inevitable is natural and can’t be too bad, but it was in my early teens, and it struck me as a sensible idea. Of course I didn’t set out to think about death in a regular way every day, but I did think about it quite often, and sure enough, it worked. Why coming to see death’s naturalness should have caused belief in an afterlife to melt away, I am unsure, but it did.
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Diana Athill
Editor and memoirist
United Kingdom · 1917–2019
Arts and letters
British literary editor and memoirist, for five decades an editor at André Deutsch, where she worked with Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul and Brian Moore. From her late eighties she wrote about old age and dying, most notably in Somewhere Towards the End (2008) and Alive, Alive Oh! (2015). She was not under a terminal diagnosis; she was writing in her nineties, from a retirement home, about being near the end. She died in January 2019, aged 101.
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