November brings mixed feelings in most of us. It signifies that Christmas is just round the corner. But it also increases awareness of our mortality as we commemorate those who have left. Confronting our own mortality is, for most people, not so much a religious issue, but rather a difficult human experience that we all have to go through, whether we hold religious or secular views of life and death.

I realised how difficult this experience is when I was told the true story of a successful local business person who some time ago needed to undergo minor surgery. While he was lying on the surgery table, the theatre nurse asked him whether he wanted to listen to some relaxing music before he was administered the anaesthetic. He was initially really impressed with the level of service offered in the hospital and asked the nurse to play some music from a Frank Sinatra CD.

The nurse obligingly slotted in the CD and started playing the song My Way while the anaesthetist was preparing to administer the anaesthetic. When the lyrics reached the part where Frank Sinatra tells us that “the time has come for me to face the final curtain” this businessman went into a state of panic. He begged the nurse to stop the music as he had no intention of facing the final curtain just yet.

The reality is that no one can defy time. However much we invest in projecting an image of unending success in our life, sooner or later we too have to face the final curtain. For some this brings a great sense of relief knowing that status is such an ephemeral thing that only fools pin all their earthly ambitions on boosting their status in society.

People who suffer from status anxiety spend most of their lives soliciting the praise and compliments of those who are prepared to demonstrate their admiration as they engage in an evanescent search for advantage from those who can dispense patronage.

So many status conscious people have such an inordinately high opinion of themselves that they are not prepared to acknowledge that, when it is time for them to go, the world will still go round, the sun will still rise every morning, and that people will still go about doing the things they have always done.

If only these neurotic people would reflect on the words of the social philosopher Alain de Botton who in his book Social Anxiety says: “Whatever differences exist between people, they are nothing compared to the differences between the most powerful human beings and the great deserts, high mountains, glaciers and oceans of the world. They are natural phenomena so large as to make the variations between any two people seem mockingly small. By spending time in vast spaces, a sense of our insignificance in the social hierarchy can be subsumed in a consoling sense of the insignificance of all humans within the cosmos.”

Now, what can beat such a consideration to cut down to size the inflated opinions that some of us have of ourselves?

While many avoid contemplating on their own mortality, they are happy to fantasise about the effect that the death of others can have on them. I am not referring here to the death of someone dear to us, but rather the death of a person who is either our adversary in life or who we envy for his or her success.

For those who feel that they have been given a raw deal by someone in authority, the anticipated death of such an individual could bring “a sweet sense of pre-emptive revenge”. Death, after all, is the most democratic natural process and dust the “most democratic of substances”. Hoping that those who persecute us will end up going straight to heaven, or preferably straight the other way, years before we do brings a sense of relief to those who despair that human justice can ever acknowledge the injuries that they have suffered.

Those who in the words of De Botton are “anchoring their lives around the pleasures of high-status positions – the rich, the beautiful, the famous and the powerful are bound to suffer more in the process of learning the cruellest lessons that death has to teach.”

Replacing status anxiety with chronic melancholy is hardly worth considering. What is important is that we “face the final curtain” with the serenity that Frank Sinatra experienced when he sang My Way.

jcassarwhite@yahoo.com