Instead of saying, “I tripped up”, you have to use the words, “I had a fall.”

Mostly the pain. I don’t want to be trapped in a body that hurts.

Seeing my kids getting older scares me.

I go in every day to the office. I don't accomplish hardly anything. I mean, in terms of – it just takes me way longer to do things. And Greg is so good. It was kind of embarrassing how good he is, because he has covered – you know, we've got about 200 businesses within Berkshire, you know, that came about, and I can't name the manager's names or their wives names, or – and I haven't seen them, you know, in a long time. It's easier just to write the letter once a year and kind of do my own thing. Greg covers more ground in a day than I would in a week, even when I was at my peak, let alone my present condition.

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.

That process depends on what you are dying of. The body can fail in ways that are extremely distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much stoicism, or it can switch off with little more than a flash of dizziness. In my family we seem to have been uncommonly lucky in that respect. There was the 82-year-old uncle who was at a meet of the Norwich Stag Hounds, enjoying a drink with friends, when crash! And he fell off his horse, dead. There was the cousin in her eighties who fell dead as she was filling a kettle to make tea, and the other cousin, 98, who slipped away so gently that the sister who was holding her hand didn’t realise that she had stopped breathing.

So, when many years later I really was near death as a result of a haemorrhage after a miscarriage, and heard a doctor saying “She’s very near collapse – call the lab and tell him to run” and understood that the “him” was the person fetching the blood they were going to pump into me, I was not in the least alarmed as I dimly wondered if I had the strength left to think some suitable Last Thought, concluded that I hadn’t, and said to myself the words: “Oh well, if I die I die.” I was sure, then, that nothingness was just that.

These matters have become discussable with one’s friends, not, of course, as a frequent part of gossip over lunch in the dining room (our only communal occasion) but from time to time, perhaps when admiring someone’s stoicism if their frailty is becoming painfully apparent, or feeling sad at someone else’s inability to accept what seems to be imminent. As a result of this openness, I think that most of the people here would consider it foolish to be frightened of being dead. All of us, however, feel some degree of anxiety about the process of dying.

The contributor to the programme I remember with the most pleasure is the man who said that not existing for thousands and thousands of years before his birth had never worried him for a moment, so why should going back into non-existence at this death cause him dismay? Everyone laughed when he said that and so did I, and as I laughed I thought: “Dead right!”

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.