Count Your Breakfasts

Twenty-six thousand.

A man in a hospice bed does the arithmetic out loud, in the gaps between breaths. Seventy-one years. Three hundred and sixty-five days. Twenty-six thousand breakfasts, give or take. His nephew, sitting by the bed, takes off his watch and does not put it back on.

Death's apprentice is new to the work. She has a pencil, hands that go through things, and one instruction from the old Death she is replacing: that her job is to be of no use. Over a year and twenty rooms she keeps her notes — what she saw, and what she could not explain, which she keeps in a second column.

Then, one September, four walkers set out for a week in the Scottish hills. A farmer with a dog he is arranging to give away. A physicist counting the shocks from the box in his chest. A neuroscientist who knows precisely what is happening inside her own head. A woman who has worn her mother's ring for fifteen years and never once taken it off. All four are dying. They have told nobody but each other. Walking behind them, unseen, is a man following a mark he found cut into the frost on a windscreen — and beside him, an old figure in a good tweed jacket who has come, for the first time in four thousand years, only to watch.

Count Your Breakfasts is not a book about death. It is a book about living, written from the one place that can see clearly what living is worth.

It has two doors. Go in by the first, the story, if you are raw — if you have lost someone lately, or are losing them now. It asks nothing of you but to sit. Go in by the second, the walk, when you are ready to have something taken off you rather than given.

Move between them. That is what they are for.