9 June 2012
Recently I've been thinking some about death, a number of the thoughts are strange. Death is not a topic I've written about before as a principal subject because I've always suspected that I'm somehow immortal, that the opportunity to start-over, to fix the misadventures of past times, will always be there. Increasingly, however, I am coming to think this not to be the case. Like so many others, I, too, will eventually die -- sooner or later. This is the ineluctable conclusion from the evidence: little signals that litter my quotidian existence and suggest I am mortal. These proofs of clay feet include aches and pains that come from muscles that are just not as quick to recover as they were before, the fact that my sleep is less sound and the effect of it less recuperative than when I was younger, the preference I have for going home earlier rather than sticking around to watch the last dog get hung and, this one does worry me, a sort of traveller's ennui extended to life.
Don't get me wrong, my traveller's ennui is not so systemic that I've turned into a curmudgeonly cynic, I'm curmudgeonly, yes, but my cynicism is still under control, it tends to be more of an amused tolerance masking jealousy when I see younger people being enthusiastic and genuine about places, people, politics, philosophy, art, religion, literature, food and each other.
It may seem, as it so often does, that I've digressed but such is not the case; no, I am addressing death. Well, not actually addressing it in the sense of speaking to it but, rather, talking about it as a fact of human existence and that's an irony, that a fact of human existence is non-existence (at least in this corporeal form). Non-existence is one of those things that we need in order to validate or define life, without the one, the notion of the other would not make much sense -- we would simply be in a steady state without the certainty that the state will not continue indefinitely.
So death is there and it's a fact and, so far as I know, no human has escaped this coil without experiencing it. When my father was dying I remember, rather strangely, trying to encourage him to let go -- he was in pain -- and I suggested that it must be a bit like standing at the open door of an airplane, your parachute on your back, facing the unknown of your first jump. I've never done this and I have no idea why the analogy came to me but giving in to death struck me that day as possibly like letting go of the frame around the door of the plane. You just give in, release and drop. The first awful moment is making yourself let go, after that I imagined it as very quiet, peaceful even, floating down, the universe spread beneath you, infinite and beautiful.
What happens after that? I've not got a single idea yet. Lots of people have written lots of things about it but I'm not sure that any of that writing is more than mere speculation. There is, as far as I know, no eye-witness account that we can rely on. Strange that; I read that there have been about 60 Billion or so humans since we first began to walk upright and I reckon, without evidence to the contrary, that all of them have died but we have no real idea what that experience of death was actually like. It's rather fun to speculate about what the experience must be like, though, at least when you're feeling reasonably good and the auguries of death are still nothing more than the minor aches and pains that accompany the aging process.
And so it goes .....
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