But since Covid-19, I’ve watched people around me – friends, family and perfect strangers my own age whose stories are told in obituaries – drop dead from this contagion. A sharp sense of existential dread has taken up residence in my psyche. That vague inevitability that I assumed would happen in the distant future smashed me over the head like an anvil in an old cartoon. I could easily die sooner than later. My mortality was, for the first time, in center focus.