That this was true, I owe to Montaigne. 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.
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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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I saw them recently on their morning walk, and they caused me a pang. I have always wanted a pug and now I can't have one, because buying a puppy when you are too old to take it for walks is unfair. There are dog-walkers, of course; but the best part of owning a dog is walking with it, enjoying its delight when it detects the signs that a walk is imminent, and its glee when its lead is unsnapped and it can bound off over the grass, casting cheerful looks back at you from time to time to make sure that you are still in touch.
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