Ever since my mother, widowed for 30 years, died aged 80 a year ago I can’t help thinking of my own impending death. She was only 20 years older than I am, and I’m extremely conscious that two decades can go by in a trice. Why, it only seems like yesterday that I was celebrating my 40th birthday, and not so long before that my 21st. I am an only child. I’m not pessimistic — I enjoy life, living comfortably with my husband and seeing both my children and grandchildren regularly. I keep busy with various hobbies and attend adult education classes, although my favourite pastimes, reading and gardening, are solitary ones. My husband and I also manage to travel within Europe and the UK several times a year, plus go to the theatre/cinema/exhibitions and eat out. But always, these thoughts come back to haunt me — my dandelion clock of time is being blown away much faster than I would like. Are these feelings normal for a person of my age (60)? And how may I overcome them? Friends of my age seem jovial enough, but I suppose that I, in turn, seem jovial to them. I have never felt like this before. Night times are the worst. I dread the thought that I will never see my garden reach maturity, or see all my grandchildren through university, or find the time to read all the books on my list, etc. I know how Dr Faustus felt. How do others cope? Any advice?

Maisie

The deluded doctor wasn’t afraid of mere death at the stroke of midnight, but of damnation; you are suffering from a tristesse, not the certain knowledge that you will be dragged to Hell by the cohorts of Mephistopheles. Since you mention no religion, let me assume that you believe in neither Hell nor Heaven, but that our short existence on this earth is all we have. In that case, let’s look back a little at your recent past, use that to examine your present, and subject the future that terrifies you to merry scrutiny.

I suspect that since your mother’s death you have become more withdrawn and find it harder to express your feelings, even to your husband. Any therapist would suggest that the current mood is triggered by this recent loss, and the sense that you have been left alone by your mother is leading inevitably to thoughts of your own death. It could well be that the melancholia is intensified by your last important bereavement. Thirty years ago you lost your father, but at the time you would have been busy looking after a family. Perhaps (in a very English way, indicated by the controlled tone of your letter) you just made yourself “get on with it”, failing to absorb his death into your being — as each of us must do, to “process” it, to discover its meaning and enable it ultimately to enrich our life.

Nothing is new; all things are a part of the human condition, the “tears of things”. In her classic text Death and the Family (1976), Lily Pincus quotes Samuel Johnson: “Our fear of death is so great that the whole of life is but keeping away the thought of it.” His response to the death of his wife in 1755 was to write, “I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer . . . without any direction or point of view; a gloomy gazer of the world to which I have little relation.” Pincus comments: “Repressed or delayed mourning may lead to such a condition, and . . . an impoverished life.” She calls bereavement “a crisis of loss, probably the most severe crisis in human existence”.

So you need to understand first that your mother’s death has almost certainly triggered a deep-level mourning for both parents. It is very common for a bereaved son or daughter to be overwhelmed by a powerful sense of stepping forward into the firing line when the second parent dies. Even men and women in their sixties sometimes maintain that it is the first time they have felt truly grown up — and the thought is frightening and depressing in equal measure.

There is no longer the parental “buffer” between you and death. You are left with the dire knowledge for which you had to make no pact with Lucifer: that, as the American writer Don Marquis puts it: “Fifteen minutes after 50 you are 60, and then in ten minutes more you are 85.” So it is we gaze wistfully at photographs of our children rosy and small, crying inside: “Where, oh where, did it all go?”

One answer to that is: “It didn’t ‘go’ anywhere; it led me to here, to where I am now, to this present ticking away upon my wrist.” I’m a great believer in trying to flip all negative thoughts to their opposite, which is why I’m asking you to view the dreaded tick of the clock as also the throb of the pulse — sure proof of the passing of time, but more importantly, and most joyfully, of the living of life.

Looking at your present, I’ll pick up your own Faustian analogy to say that I find one element in the Goethe version of the old story that is relevant to your situation. At midnight, four “grey women” appear at the door of the foolish magician. They are called Want, Guilt, Distress and Worry. Because the grand door is locked, Want, Guilt and Distress can’t enter, since people with money are protected from them. But Worry knows she can always skip in “even at the keyhole”. And so she does, reminding the doomed man: “Whom I once possess will ever/Find the world not worth endeavour.” For, she says, the person riddled with worry will never be able fully to appreciate what he has, and always be looking to a future he never can achieve.

Well, old Faustus had plenty to worry about, but you do not — other than the Timor mortis conturbat me (fear of death worries me) which is the refrain of anonymous medieval lyrics. If you worry about not being able to control the uncontrollable, if you allow your fears to dominate your nights, you will feel tired and stressed, and nothing is more ageing than that. Please don’t collude in this shortening of your life by worrying about its end. We have to face first the absolute uncertainty of life and then ineluctable inevitability of its ending, but the bridge between the two is the knowledge of your inner self.

I don’t know what others do, but my way of coping is to reflect calmly on death every single day. Around my house I have little Mexican skulls for the Day of the Dead, and other jovial reminders of my own mortality. They tell me to seize the time. They remind me, when I pinch the skin on my arm and see how wrinkly it is, not to see the sight as a grim warning but to feel the hard little pinch as proof that I am alive: a feeling, sentient being with so much life in me yet. By meditating on, and accepting the prospect of your own death, you can fling yourself more actively into a present of celebration. No, you will not see your garden grow to maturity; all the more reason to plant two exquisite cherry trees for your parents, to delight those who will live in the place after you. And throw away that book list, because the books that you love don’t deserve to be made instruments of punishment.

What are you going to do with the next 20 years? Why not forget Faustus and instead make a Proustian pact with the future, transforming your preoccupation with your mother and with lost time into a lifeline for your grandchildren? One way of coping with your fear of death might be to embark on an exercise of retrieval — writing your life for your family and thus recording your parents’ lives too. If you visit www.therememberingsite.org and pay just $10 (£5.73) you will find a myriad questions and thoughts to help you with this project, leading you through so that you never have to feel blocked.

Tell your children’s children what it was like when you were at school, what your mother liked to wear, what songs you liked, whether your father told you to turn down the volume . . . This way you can wrap up time like a gift, for the future.

E-mail your problems to: bel.mooney@thetimes.co.uk or write to her at: times2, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT. Detail such as your age is helpful. Please include your real name, but we will use