Death Notices

I forget where I first heard or read it, and who uttered the remark, but it went something like this: "You know you are getting old when the first thing you look at in the newspaper is the Obituaries (or Death Notices). That's one way I've known for many years that my younger brother, three and a bit years younger than I am, has been much older than I since soon after we left Australia for what became permanent exile, early in 1964; whenever we have gone back to Adelaide on visits and stayed in his home, he has always studied the death notices in the paper most diligently at the breakfast table. I've never done that, at any rate not until recently. Lately I've begun scanning death notices in the Globe and Mail, Canada's "national" newspaper, to watch for one specific death notice, that of the Grand Old Man of Canadian public health, Harding Leriche, now in his mid-90s and in failing health. He is an old and dear friend whose passing I shall mourn. There's only one other place I look at obituaries, the British Medical Journal. I look at these because I get this journal free as an honorary life member, a standing conferred on all who have been members of the British Medical Association for 50 years. And as I worked in Britain altogether for some 10 years and have many British friends, it's worth looking at the obituaries because of course my British contemporaries are like me, in the age range where we are dying off. Hardly a week goes by without someone I knew, even someone I once worked with, leaving this life, this vale of tears. Thinking about it, I'm astonished that I had such a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, the latter almost all professional colleagues. Among those to die recently have been my mentor, Jerry Morris, a truly great man who rated a whole page obituary in the BMJ, and several pages and photographs in the International Journal of Epidemiology, the main periodical of my trade. Another eminent man who has lately fallen off his perch is my exact contemporary and good friend, Donald Acheson, eminent epidemiologist and some time Chief Medical Officer of the UK. He too got a whole page and his photo in the BMJ. At least a dozen other friends, colleagues, born in the 1920s or early 1930s, have had obituaries in the BMJ in the past year or so. As a devout atheist, I know there is no after-life, only oblivion, which of course makes this life we each have, a very precious, indeed a unique gift that is beyond price. Most of the time I'm like Woody Allen, I know all about the inevitability of death, I just don't want it to happen to me. I most certainly don't want this inevitable fate to overtake me until I have completed my task of caring for Wendy. After that, I won't mind in the least.