The Final Re-set.

Apparently, this is the year of the Great Reset.

I keep hearing it. The dotty interpreters of Tarot cards and astrologers I tend to fall asleep to, seem terribly excited about this particular lap around the sun, with various celestial bodies changing signs, cycles ending, cosmic nodes re-aligning and energies shifting with the annual planetary diaspora.

These are all apparently conspiring to encourage us to reconsider our relationships, careers, purpose and whether or not we continue to eat bacon.

The idea of a reset is not unappealing. We, the people, have always been fond of a do-over. New Year's Day is the classic representation, when millions of us wake with astonishing determination, to announce that this is the year of the new me. The better version. The 2-point-ooh-la-la. The alarmingly sober, more punctual, conscientious and emotionally available me.

We actually reset a lot, when you think about it. After divorce. After redundancy. After the children leave home. We move countries, change careers, fall on and off the wagon, start running, sell the house and finally buy the motorbike.

Life offers plenty of opportunities to begin again.

But there is another reset that doesn't receive quite the same promotional treatment.

Death.

There. I've said it...

Death is surely the greatest reset of them all, although perhaps reset is already too comforting a word. A reset suggests that something eventually comes back on. That after a brief period of darkness, the screen flickers back to life in an up-beat, re-boot. We get to carry on with the script and carefully pen another few chapters.

And perhaps that is why mankind has always had such difficulty staring death in the face.

We can cope with endings when they contain the suggestion of another beginning, like the Star Wars trilogy, but the idea of absolute finality – the switch being thrown, the screen going black, the extraordinary private experience of being me simply ceasing – is almost impossible for a conscious mind to contemplate. We can imagine being dead, but only rather badly, because there we still are, imagining it.

So almost everywhere that human beings have gathered long enough to bury their dear departed, fairly fantastical stories have gathered around the grave with them. Heavens and underworlds were imagined, mostly around a socially accepted duality of reward or punishment - coupled for the well-behaved - with a reassurance of either reincarnation or rest eternal. We decided that our (non-criminal) ancestors were now spirits - souls returning home or beginning another, more ethereal journey.

Of course, organised religion found enormously fertile ground here. Faiths from Christianity and Islam developed powerful visions of what might await us after death, while the black dog that was Catholic Europe, became really polished at populating the Western imagination with judgement, salvation, Heaven, Hell and, for everything that fell between the cracks, the eternal indifference of a waiting room called Purgatory.

The proposition was certainly compelling. Death was not actually death at all, but a border crossing. Live well, pay up - and something infinitely better might await you on the other side; get a bad earthly report card and your personal spell in eternity, would prove considerably less comfortable.

But perhaps mainstream religion's extraordinary success in marketing the recto-verso of an afterlife tells us something less interesting about religion than it does about us.

Because the question tees itself up like an oversized golf ball:

Would the promise of eternal life ever have held quite such power over us, if we weren't so profoundly disturbed by the possibility of no life at all?

Perhaps the afterlife is true. I certainly don't know, and neither does anyone who hasn't yet completed the journey. That is what makes it such a perfect honey-trap. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence... it's a fence-sitters absolute worst nightmare.

Death itself, is so touchy a subject that even our language seems reluctant to use it. We rarely say that somebody died if a more abstract expression can be found. They passed away. Went over. Departed. Left us. Crossed the rainbow bridge. We turn death instinctively into a journey because journeys, unlike endings, have destinations. And that is the special kind of kindness that humankind has grandly bestowed on itself.

And perhaps that is what makes death the final reset rather than merely another one. Every other reset in life leaves somebody standing, staring at the pieces. Divorce, bankruptcy, retirement, recovery, reinvention – however upsetting the change, there remains a you who must wake the following morning and work out what comes next, over a bowl of cornflakes.

Death is the only reset from which, as far as we can know with certainty, we don't get to report back. Which sounds terribly gloomy.

Oddly enough, I think it is anything but...

There is a wonderful expression, attributed to various thinkers: that death is not the opposite of life, but part of it. Whoever wrote that, seems to get it. The idea has always appealed to me because removing death from our understanding of life is rather like losing the ability to read between the lines, or not to appreciate silence as much as music. The ending is part of what gives shape to everything that came before it.

Which brings me to funerals.

So firstly, I have not been to many. I am talking five or maybe six here... I probably could have attended more than that, but it is what it is. But they are such deeply fascinating events. Unifying on levels that stretch from families to communities to entire Nations.

People travel halfway around the world to be there. Old friends appear from decades ago. Photographs are found in drawers. Stories are remembered that nobody has told for years. Flowers arrive. Good, sober clothes are worn, except in Italy of course, where it is still more about the mirror than the mourning.

Then somebody stands up and tells the room what the person who died actually meant to them.

He changed my life...She was always there for me...I never told him how much his friendship mattered.

And that's the bit that bothers me. "I never told him"... Why on earth not?

We have assembled everybody this person loved, brought them together in one room, spent several thousand euros, purchased enough flowers to shame a Punjabi wedding, and finally found the courage to articulate precisely what this boxed and wrapped human being meant to us. In the past tense...

Which is why I have long been fascinated by the idea of the living funeral.

The Japanese, characteristically, got there first and have - of course they do - a cool word for it. They call it seizensō - a funeral while alive - and they have been holding them since the early 1990s - I was living there at the time - when a pop-celebrity broadcast her own living funeral to a massive television audience. Incense, eulogies, and a playlist that reportedly included both a classical requiem and - in the spirit of all things modern Japan - a rendition of "Santa Claus is coming to town"... I found this enormously reassuring.

Though Japan also reveals the angle nobody puts on the invitation. There, a seizensō is sometimes less a celebration than a severance - an old person releasing their family from the obligation of mourning them properly later. Not "come and tell me what I meant to you," but more like "please, when the time comes, don't go to any trouble or spend too much." The same ceremony, pointed at a somewhat self-effacing, strategic withdrawal rather than the fanfare of celebrated connection. Worth knowing, before I make my own case for the opposite.

But I am still not sure if I would want to attend my own living funeral. I think I might have what almost no-one calls "F.N.E." - Fear of Negative Evaluation. In other words, worry around no-one turning up to say anything remotely nice or memorable about me. Or perhaps just not turning up at all. I suppose the part I cannot quite get past, is a response to the obvious question of:

Why do we save some of our finest words for people who can no longer receive them?..

Flowers are more useful when someone can smell them or declare they "always hated lilies"... Gratitude is considerably more sparkly when its intended recipient is sitting right opposite.

And a living funeral wouldn't need to be entirely about everybody telling me how marvellous I am, enjoyable though an unprecedented ninety minutes of that might be. I would have responsibilities too.

I could tell them stuff...

Take the friend from forty years ago aside, and say "Thank you for being such a great mate". Convey to Vanessa how she made my life so worth living - and although she will never find anyone half as good as me - it is OK if she has a quick look, once I'm gone. Tell the last faithful dog I will be lucky to have, that he has been such a good boy.

I suppose the counter-argument for all this, would be around the obligation of it all. It is not easy to look at the living soul whose seizensō you are attending, and say you never actually liked them. That is difficult enough at a normal funeral, but at least the properly dead don't stare back at the pulpit, shaking their heads in dismay...

A living funeral could be a sort of emotional customs desk at which some of the baggage we've been dragging around for decades is finally opened.

Although perhaps not all of it.

I mean, I accept that talking about death can feel uncomfortable and is viewed as being a little morbid. We push it away with such emotional angst... "Let's not talk about that" or "I don't think we are quite there yet..."

Look at the time and effort we spend, polishing the milestones of life... "For my 18th birthday, I would love to"... and then insert 30th...40th...50th and the rest, along with bat-mitzvahs wedding days, anniversaries and retirement parties.

Yet we still shy away from life's great finish line... the one normally represented with a tape and cameras and fireworks and cheering crowds - the chequered flag we take, arms held high and punching the sky, in a massive "I did it..."

The ancient Stoics seemed to get it. "Memento Mori" – remember that you will die – wasn't intended as a miserable slogan to ruin a perfectly nice day in ancient Rome. It was a reminder to pay attention to the day - precisely because there aren't an infinite number of them. To inspire, motivate and clarify. A finite life has value - almost entirely - because it is finite.

Nobody treasures an unlimited edition.

And perhaps that is what interests me about all this talk of resets. We spend so much of our lives waiting for the next chapter to begin. When the children are older. When we have enough money. When work settles down. When we've lost the weight. When we've found ourselves. When the bullshit around Mercury retro-grading has stopped being an excuse...

Perhaps making a little room for death at the table does something useful. It punctures the rather optimistic illusion that there will always be plenty of time, and reminds us to make something of the time that remains.

It is my birthday next week, and I am officially declaring entry into the final third of my life. The last 30 years. I will possibly cut this cake further, by saying the last 10 years depend on the first 20, and the last 20 on the first 10 - BUT - I am all in.

Whether (and I probably won't) or not I opt for the oddity of a living funeral, I would like to enjoy the flowers while I can still smell them, the stories while I can remember them, and the feel of family while I still have sensation.

After all, it seems rather wasteful to save the best bits of being alive until I'm dead.

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.