The Clock You Can’t Un-hear

Living Fully When the End Is Visible

There is a moment, not a single moment, really, but more like a gradual arrival, when you become aware of the clock.

For me, it began with the realization that I am closer to 70 than to 60. It was the birth of my first granddaughter and the loss of my oldest friend. It was the passing of both parents and, eventually, the loss of my professional identity. This realization is not abstract or philosophical. It is not something you read about in a book on ageing or discuss in a seminar on end-of-life planning. In a personal, physical, undeniable sense, the clock is running. You can hear it more clearly now.

Once you’ve heard it, you can’t go back to the time before you heard it.

For me, that awareness arrived at 45, when a cancer diagnosis made it impossible to not think about the clock. I’ve written about survival, the luck, the doctors, the long road back, using my bike as both metaphor and tool. But what I haven’t fully defined is what survival left behind: not just gratitude, not just the unease of thriving I wrote about in Part Three, but something quieter and more enduring: a background awareness of time that has never entirely switched off.

Twenty-five years later, the clock is still there, reminding me of what’s inevitable. But I’ve slowly learned to hear it differently. It’s louder, for sure. But my sense of it is altered.

The previous pieces in this series explored grief and a general meh, you experience around and with aging. For others — for parents, for a former self, and for the asymmetry of health and luck. This one is about the grief that lives closest: the awareness of your own finitude and how you live with it as it moves towards you.

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I’ve been sitting with mortality awareness long enough now that I no longer experience it fearfully. That wasn’t always true. In the early years after cancer, every check-up carried a particular weight. The weeks between blood tests felt like months. The hours before seeing blood test results felt like holding one’s breath. A suspension of normal time.

I can still recall the smell of the chemotherapy clinic — that particular blend of antiseptic and anxiety that I don’t think ever fully leaves you. The relief that followed was real, but it was temporary — because what you learn from surviving something serious is not that you are safe. It’s that safety was always an illusion, one you couldn’t see through before.

What changes over time, and this took me years to understand, is the relationship between awareness and living. At first, they compete. Awareness intrudes on the morning ride, the good dinner, and the ordinary afternoon, which suddenly feels both precious and fragile. You’re present and watching yourself be present at the same time, which is its own kind of exhaustion.

Slowly, something shifts. The awareness stops being an interruption and becomes a rhythm. It’s still there — it never fully goes away — but it becomes less like a siren and more like a compass. It no longer sounds the alarm. It points.

By the time I turned 65 and now almost turning 70, aging itself had added its own layer. Not the dramatic confrontation of a diagnosis, but the cumulative evidence of a body keeping its own honest account.

Today, recovery takes a day longer than it used to. The face in the mirror is unmistakably older. Friends get sick in ways that don’t fully resolve. The table, as I wrote in Part One, keeps losing people. You don’t need a diagnosis to hear the clock at 70. Time makes itself visible.

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Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has spent her career studying what happens when people become genuinely aware that time is limited. Her research, which she developed into socioemotional selectivity theory, found something that runs counter to what most of us expect: people who perceive their time horizon as finite don’t typically become more anxious or withdrawn. Instead, they become more intentional.

Carstensen found that as time horizons shorten, priorities clarify. The trivial falls away. The things that genuinely matter — deep relationships, meaningful work, and present experience over future accumulation — move to the centre. Her research showed that, on average, older adults report higher emotional well-being than younger adults, not despite their proximity to death but partly because of it. When clearly perceived, the ending sharpens the present.

That finding made me stop and think because it described something I had experienced but not yet articulated. The years since cancer have not been the most anxious of my life. In many ways, they have been the most alive. Not because I stopped being afraid of possible reoccurrence. I was afraid, for a long time. But because the fear became a teacher over time. It taught me what I truly valued. It showed me the difference between urgency and importance. It made certain conversations necessary that I might otherwise have put off indefinitely.

There is also the framework psychologists call post-traumatic growth — the well-documented finding that people who survive serious illness or loss often report not only recovery but also a deepened appreciation for life they wouldn’t have otherwise. I’m cautious about claiming this too neatly, because the path isn’t linear or guaranteed, and there were stretches when what I felt was neither growth nor gratitude but something rawer and harder to define.

But looking back across two and a half decades, the direction of travel has been toward more: more presence, more honesty, more willingness to say the things that need to be said while there is still time.

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In my very first piece on The Long Ride, I wrote about regret — the idea that it isn’t proof you failed but proof you can tell the difference between the life you lived and the one you still want. I’ve thought about that line a lot in relation to mortality, because I think the two are more closely connected than they first appear.

The clock is not, I’ve decided, primarily a source of dread. It is more a clarifying instrument. It answers the question of what to do next by making certain answers clearly wrong. It rules out indefinite postponement of difficult conversations, the passive drift through relationships that no longer feed you, and continued investment in things that looked important from a distance but shrink on closer examination.

When time is genuinely finite — not merely theoretical, as it is at 30, but visibly and tangibly finite, the cost of spending it badly becomes real in a way it wasn’t before.

At 69, I notice I am considerably less interested in many things that drained real energy in my forties and fifties. Status. Arguments that didn’t matter. Proving points to people who weren’t going to hear them anyway. The performance of productivity. The management of other people’s impressions of me. Some of that loss is simply aging. But some of it, I think, is the clock doing its clarifying work — quietly retiring the things that were never actually mine to begin with.

What remains is simpler and more worth protecting. My family. The bike. This writing which has become therapy. The friends still at the table. The mornings that begin before anyone else is up, when the day is still unmade and entirely possible. Those things haven’t dulled with age. If anything, they’ve grown more vivid.

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I want to be honest about what peace with mortality looks like, because I think the word ‘peace’ can imply a serenity I haven’t fully achieved and may never attain.

There are still mornings when awareness arrives with an edge rather than a compass bearing. When someone I care about gets bad news, or when I notice something in my own body that I file away to ask about, the clock doesn’t sound peaceful. It sounds like what it is: the ticking of something that will eventually stop.

But I’ve come to think that peace with mortality doesn’t mean the absence of those moments. It means they no longer organize the rest of the day. The fear passes through, and the morning continues. The ride still happens. The writing continues. The call still gets made. The clock is now part of the background. That’s not the same as silence, but it is, I think, a liveable relationship with something that has no resolution.

What helped me most in arriving at that livable relationship was not any single insight but a gradual accumulation: of years that turned out to be good, of relationships that deepened rather than thinned, of work that felt worth doing.

The evidence, slowly assembled, showed that the time since the diagnosis had not been wasted. That helped more than any philosophy or framework. Simply: the years were good. Amazing, really. That makes the remaining ones feel worth living fully, rather than spent in anticipation of their end.

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Here is what the clock has taught me over twenty-five years of listening to it.

Let it clarify, not paralyze.

Awareness of mortality is not a sentence. It is information. The question it poses: What do you want to do with the time you have left? — is among the most useful things a person can ask. Most of us spend decades avoiding it. Those who engage with it tend to live better, not worse.

Say the things that need to be said.

This series has returned to this point in different forms because it remains true. The conversations you’ve been putting off. The people you haven’t told how much they mean to you. The apologies that are still outstanding. The clock makes the cost of postponing these things clear. Pay attention to that.

Invest in what remains.

Carstensen’s research found that as time horizons shorten, people naturally move toward depth over breadth — fewer relationships, but more honest ones; fewer commitments, but more present ones. That narrowing isn’t a loss. It’s curation. The things that survive the process are worth keeping.

Don’t perform equanimity you don’t feel.

The cultural pressure to be ‘at peace’ with aging and death can produce its own quiet dishonesty — a performance of serenity that masks real fear or grief. Your fear of dying is legitimate. Your grief for the years already lived is also legitimate. Both deserve room alongside whatever peace you’ve genuinely reached. Honesty is more useful than composure.

Keep going.

This sounds simple, and in its way, it’s the hardest. The clock isn’t an argument for stopping. It’s an argument for continuing with more intention than you brought to the years when time felt infinite. The ride still happens. The piece still gets written. The table still gets set. That’s the answer. Keep going.

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The clock you can’t unhear is not, I’ve decided, the enemy. It is the most honest thing about being alive. It tells you that time is finite, which is the only reason any of it means anything. The friends and family at the table still means something because there will be fewer of them. The morning ride means something because there will be fewer of those, too.

The conversation with your son or daughter, the piece of writing that finally flows easily, the ordinary Tuesday that surprises you with how good it feels to greet it — all of it means something because it all ends. That’s not a tragedy. That’s the deal. That’s life.

As I approach my 70th year, having survived what I’ve survived, lost what I’ve lost, and built what I’ve built, I find I am more interested in the deal than ever. Not resigned to it. Interested in it. Awake to it.

The clock is still running. I’m still here. That’s enough to work with.

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I didn’t disclose it at the beginning, but much of this series was born from the journaling I started during simultaneous sale of my company and the start of the pandemic — for reasons I am still not entirely clear on. I’m glad if any of it resonated.

If any part of The Long Losses stayed with you — the table, the parents, the unease of thriving, the person you used to be, the clock — I’d love to hear from you. Share in the comments or send me a DM.

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Research & sources referenced in this piece

Carstensen, L.L. Socioemotional Selectivity Theory. Stanford University. Foundational papers: American Psychologist, 54 (1999); Motivation and Emotion (2003).

Greenberg, J., Solomon, S. & Pyszczynski, T. Terror Management Theory. The Worm at the Core (2015). Built on Becker, E. The Denial of Death (1973).

Tedeschi, R.G. & Calhoun, L.G. (1995). Post-traumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1).