The Dance of Death from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957)
One of my favourite jokes about death is one I heard on the Dave Allen show. One man says to another “I’d like to know where I’m going to die”. “Why would you want to know a thing like that?” asks his friend. “So I’d know never to go there”, the man replies.
This has the same perverse Irish logic of someone asking for directions and being told “Well, I wouldn’t start from here if I were you!”
The harsh reality is that we are here and one day we won’t be.
The poet/priest John O’Donohue (another Irishman!) said that people are happy at funerals because they are not the one in the coffin but this contentment has a limited duration. O’Donohue himself died suddenly in his sleep while on holiday in France aged just 52. The cause of death has never been officially released but it’s fair to assume that he didn’t see his end coming quite so soon.
We all calculate a life expectancy of at least 70 and, if we’re lucky, we might even sneak in two or three decades more. But most of the time the thought of shuffling off this mortal coil is one that we put to the back of our minds. Continue reading
