There is an entry in my father’s diary which moved me deeply when I read it after he died. The entry was made in his eighty-fourth year and on this day he recorded his sense of being two different selves. One he can easily define – it is his body grown old and now much broken down, limbs weak and steps hesitant, thinned hair and muffled hearing and dimming eyes, the pains of illness taking an increasing toll, night agues and fears more frequent now, all litheness gone and sleekness of the skin, the felt fragility of bones getting closer and closer to escaping the bonds of flesh, a general decrepitude which dishonours what the human body in its perfection can be.
The other self my father feels just as vividly and even more deeply but it is not so easy to describe. All he can say is that it is the same self he has always been. It is himself every moment he has ever been. It is himself when he was a little boy running in front of his mother on the grass to try and catch a bird that landed for a moment in front of them. It is himself as a young man with friends in a sailing dinghy in golden sun with the wind in his hair and all life good and stretching into the future forever. It is himself in the plenitude of career achievement and athletic vigour. It is himself breathless before the wonders of new worlds discovered. It is himself with his beloved every step of the way, now more than 60 years long, changeless in the grace of their love and the blessing of their children. That self has always been the same and now he can write in his diary and say it is still not intimidated by the other self which changes and grows old and decrepit and will soon die.
It is true what my father wrote. There is not one of us who does not feel the two selves that we are – the changing body, the unchanging core of self. As I begin my eighty-third year of whatever strange journey this is I feel the truth of the two selves strongly. The aging body, so much fuller now of
