Watching Blur: To The End the other day — a documentary about the last reunion of the band, which is ostensibly about their recording the Ballad of Darren album and then playing Wembley Stadium, but is really a messy, half-formed movie about the band’s relationship with each other now that they’re actually feeling older — I was struck by Damon Albarn saying something along the lines of, there was a point where I realized I don’t have that long left before I die, and pinning that to being 55 years old. I had this immediate bifurcated response of, wait, is Damon Albarn only five years older than me? and I don’t feel like that at all, even though I feel old.
Thinking about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever really had a sense of my own mortality, really. That’s not to say that I think I’m invincible or irrationally immortal, simply that I don’t really think about death so much. When I cast my mind back to my childhood and think about my parents, I realize the same was true about them, at least from my point of view — they didn’t act as if they were especially concerned about death being around the corner, at least to a point of wanting to actually do something about it. (Not only were their diets terrible, but both were heavy smokers and my father a functional alcoholic.) My grandmother, too, the one that lived with us when I was a kid, she did seem immortal to me as grandparents do when you’re a child. There was a sense that she’d live forever, in large part because that was how she acted, even after she had a stroke.
I turned 50 years old last year and felt immediately weighed down by the prospect of being old, but that was an abstract concern of “Now I will ache and be brittle more” than any true thoughts of my time on this earth being slipping away with every breath. Perhaps it’s a problem with my (admittedly flawed) sense of forward planning; I simply can’t imagine the idea of getting so old and then dying. That feels impossible to me, for some inexplicable reason; my brain short-circuits: Do people still do that? it asks, and then moves on to another subject.
Objectively, I know that the odds of me living to be 100 years old are, shall we say, unlikely, and yet… I still feel as mortal as I did at 30, if not younger. Maybe that’ll change in the next handful of years. Perhaps by the time I’m 55.
Albarn is actually seven years older than me, but given the production schedule of the movie, it makes sense he would’ve been around 55 or 56 when it was being shot. Just in case you’re wondering. Yes, I looked it up after.