At your favourite wave during the swell of the
year?
Yesterday, a Little Avalon local, and by local I
mean…local… drowned while surfing his favourite
wave. LA Bob or Homeless Bob aka Bob Bevern was sixty-two
and lived in a van on the clifftop overlooking the little Sydney
reef after a divorce, a kid, lack of work and so on soaked up his
cash reserves.
After a while, the low-cost breezy lifestyle grew upon him.
“I’ve been called crazy on a number of occasions,” he said in a
featurette made last year. Bob described the joy of “laying
back enveloped by the wave” and vowed to live next to the surf
until he died.
Now, drowning ain’t pretty.
But neither is being eighty years old and living in a dementia
ward, rattling around the corridors in a perpetual state of
confusion or being eaten alive by cancer in front of your family,
your final days, months, lived in a morphine haze.
Click, click, click.
And the prologues to old age, as written by the author Mary
Roach, “loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression,
senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like
a holiday at the beach.”
How do you want to split this mortal coil?
Like Bob, at your favourite wave, during the swell of the year,
your van still parked on the headland, full of your books, your
clothes? Your memory still warm in people’s hearts?
Maybe hit by a White?
Or would you prefer the common end: hospital bed, muttering
doctors, plastic tubes, toxic chemicals, fluorescent lights, before
straight-lining and being sent to the ice box at the morgue and
then prepped and readied for cremation?
