Death steals in

I knew him as a colleague twenty years ago, he moved on, we hardly met again, once, I think, when I gave a talk in his Department and once when he came to ours, a couple of years ago, when I was struck by how similar were his themes to those he struggled with years ago, our preoccupations deepen, they do not widen, it seems, but at last we start to see our own pattern .... And his girlfriend, who used to visit, then news of their marriage. And now, out of the blue sky whence nothing unforeseen can come, his death after illness is announced, 'his family were with him at the end'. I remember them when they were young, before there were children, how old was he, his mid-fifties, perhaps, a little younger. We are sad and surprised, but it is still a relatively distant death, we do not suffer grief but we think of what it is to die, of what it is to face its prospect.

Seals, they are always there, bobbing in the water, in the surge of small waves, or basking on the shore from which they roll and shuffle when they see us come, but we have a strange affinity, we and the seals, have reason to observe each other: we meet on the foreshore or in the shallows, in and out of each other's element, but only ever in the shallows or on the foreshore. In our element they are ungainly and vulnerable, in theirs so are we. And we merely observe each other, the seals at their edge, regarding us at ours as thus our two worlds touch and shift with the swirl and movement of water over sand and rock. We cannot survive long in their world, nor they in ours, and so we observe each other and, when we think we are unobserved, we creep into or out of the water, to test and bask and rest and float, another world, with struggles and ecstasies we know nothing of, the limits and otherness of death.