There are always years you know will be important because they carry with them programmed changes; leaving school, graduation, and so on. But most of the really important things in life – the events carrying with them the joys or sadness that shape personality, or the experiences or ideas that will always haunt your imagination – arrive unannounced, or with little notice.

Some say a sense of mortality is with us from birth, the basic instinct that pushes us to overcome illness and to resist all physical threats. Some say we carry with us from infancy intimations of immortality. At the start of 1995 I had no idea I was entering the year which would release the passions and convictions which still look likely to shape the rest of my life.

Until 1995 I had no real sense of the proximity of death, of its personal inevitability. Neither had I given any thought to what brings immortality, to why some names survive down the centuries while the names of other mortals, are just that, mortal, from dust to dust. The dramatic revelations, both of my own mortality, and of the nature of immortality, were set in a family context.

Although Florence was in her 89th year there was nothing to suggest at the start of the year that her death was imminent. Anne and I, visiting her regularly in Glastonbury, felt she could live comfortably for some years to come, although the question of finding some acceptable form of sheltered accommodation for her was becoming more urgent as it became more difficult for her to cope with living alone.

The first alarm was when John telephoned Brussels to say that Florence had had a fall. Although she seemed uninjured, she had been taken into the nearby cottage hospital in Butleigh, where her future would be assessed by the doctors and social services. We travelled to Butleigh as soon as we could, and found Florence in good form and extremely well looked after. In some ways it seemed a pity that the cottage hospital could not take on long-term geriatric care, particularly as there were signs that she was adapting to her new surroundings and seemed to have forgotten almost completely the little house she had left only weeks earlier.

Some weeks later, alerted by John that Mum had a kidney infection, Anne and I again travelled to Butleigh, taking Patricia, who had some free days, with us. The weather was magnificent as we neared the hospital. The lush greens of the ditches, fields and hills of early-summer Somerset were magnificent. We were stunned to tears by our first sighting of Florence, a shrunken old woman struggling to recognise us from her propped-up position in bed at the end of the sunny ward. What shocked me most was that when I gulped the car park air, after what I believed might prove to be my last inconsequential chat with my mother, I felt that had I found the euthanasia facility of Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s van sitting in the car park, I would have tried to sign her in immediately.

Yet, Florence recovered and was her same old cheerful self a mere ten days later.

Not long afterwards, there was desperate news from Dublin of a totally unexpected diagnosis. Anne’s elder brother Bernard, who had just taken early retirement from his university professorship, had leukaemia and was undergoing urgent hospital treatment. Three weeks later he was dead.

This death of a family contemporary hit us more than any other loss of family or friends. The deaths of Anne’s parents were in the natural order of things, as was Florence’s, two months later, when she died peacefully in her own nursing home room, having been brought back there after a Sunday afternoon visit to John and his family. The way Bernard went was a turning that could take Anne or me any time. I feel that pain each time my eye catches the smiles of Bernard, of his wife Maura, and of my own bearded face, as we were photographed arriving together for that summer’s formal dinner reception to mark the marriage of our niece, Rachel.

That was how my sense of mortality arrived. From then on, each day has seemed more precious than those of the years previously. Bernard’s and Florence’s funerals were among the most precious of days.

Everyone loved Bernard and he knew an enormous number of people, not least the students he taught. His funeral in the chapel of the university saw a tremendous outpouring of friendship and support for his family. The buffet lunch held afterwards in the home of one of Maura’s sisters was the most outstanding extended family occasion I ever experienced. It was clear that Justin and Patricia’s priority was to support Anne and that they, and all the other nieces and nephews, represented a new generation of which the whole family could be proud.

Florence had few friends outside her immediate family who could have been expected to participate in cold pre-Christmas weather at her cremation in Taunton and her memorial service in Glastonbury. John and I tried to see that both were conducted in the spirit of Mum’s commitment to the Anglicanism of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. We wanted above all to give thanks for her life. She would have been immensely proud of the readings by two of her granddaughters in the memorial service.

My insight into immortality evolved further at the drinks in John’s house following the memorial service. I was talking with Justin, who had come down from London for his grandmother’s funeral, about the latest internet developments. Justin asked me was I aware that there were a lot of references to me on the world wide web?

Up to that point I had never stopped to think how my name might crop up on web pages. I had never thought of asking one of my staff to launch a search for my name using one of the new search engines. Justin, who was proud of his own personal website, had put in a search for references. Apparently the list of documents carrying references to me consisted largely of reports of meetings or conferences at which I had been present or spoken. Most of these reports were quite recent and related to my professional library activities. Some were even in languages other than English. The biggest surprise was that one item covered my 1988 visit to the Soviet Academy of Social Services.

My immediate reaction to Justin’s research report was a realisation that there on the internet, in what so many people regarded as the most ephemeral and inconsequential medium of all, was perhaps the most substantial account of my life and work available anywhere. And, “Yes”, I knew that internet archives might survive a global nuclear war. A number of national and international bodies were working on the permanent storage of digital material and of the various computers, readers and scanners that might be required to read successive generations of electronic data.

Read more: 1996 – Health, Travel, Readings and a Burial