I know, I know – I said I was going to try to update every week or so. That’s still the plan, but this entry took a little extra time to finish – it’s a heavy one. I promise I’ll do something lighter next time –R.
I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. No, not in a “Woe is me” or a “Check me out, I’m sooo dark and brooding” kind of way. I guess I’m in yet another stage of coming to terms with it. I think we come to terms with death (if we ever do) in a series of stages: when you’re small, you learn that it happens. When you’re older, you begin to understand that it happens to everyone, and that yes, that means you too.
I’ve been afraid of dying ever since I found out about it. During my times of deepest depression, that fear made the suicidal thoughts much more disturbing: I was afraid of dying, and I worried that someone might try to kill me. Moreover, the person I feared the most was myself.
At the moment, I guess I’m coming to terms with the fact that it seems I say goodbye to people more than I say hello. My world of friends and family seems to be shrinking rather than growing. I’ve had to say goodbye to some really important people: my mother, my grandparents (the ones I knew, anyway), aunts and uncles, cousins. I’ve lost friends, some close and some not so close, but friends, nonetheless. It’s strange to think that conversations we had, moments we shared, jokes that only existed between us – those things now exist only in my imperfect memory.
It isn’t the milestone birthdays (“the big whatever-oh”) that have made me feel old. What really makes me feel old is seeing the people with whom I have shared the world depart from it. That includes people I don’t even know, the celebrities and public figures who also formed part of my world. It seems incredible to me that I should have been lucky enough to walk the earth at the same time as people like David Bowie, Harlan Ellison, Tim Curry, and Miles Davis, to name only a few – and if I never got to meet them, at least I got to be aware of them and appreciate their work while they were alive.
And it’s not just the goodbyes I’ve had to say that really make me feel the weight of age; it’s the realization that the rest of my life will very likely have more goodbyes than hellos. That makes me sad; I love discovering new people and the things they’re doing, the things they say, the joy they bring to the world.
There is a childish voice inside me that keeps repeating that death just isn’t fair; that it’s somehow not right that we should meet and know people only to have them taken away, whether it’s expected or not. The rational part of my mind replies that of course it is fair: we are born, we live, and we die. That’s the deal, and moreover, it’s our responsibility to do so, to move over and let all those new little lives have a go.
It often bothers me (as I suspect it may occasionally bother some of you) that I haven’t done more with the life I’ve had so far. If only my mental health struggles hadn’t robbed me of so much time and energy; if only I’d known this or that key fact of life a few years earlier; if only I’d worked harder, been smarter, made different choices, been luckier.
Shoulda, coulda, woulda.
Occasionally I obsess over how much time I may or may not have left. Will I have a chance to tell all the stories, sing all the songs, say all the words that are in me? Does anyone?
As much as I want to believe that death isn’t the end of everything, I (like everyone) am working from a frustrating lack of unbiased information. It seems that for anyone with anything to say on the subject – all the religions, but plenty of atheists and agnostics too – there is a tendency to only point to whatever evidence supports a particular foregone conclusion. Even if one believes in a supreme being, even the religious texts that promise life after death are frustratingly vague about the nature of it.
What happens? Where do we go? What happens to the flame when we blow out a candle? The simplest and scariest conclusion is that when we die, it’s over: we’re just gone. Life is binary. We are zero, we are born and get to be “one” for a while, and then we return to zero. It squares the ledger.
And yet.
I can’t escape the feeling that we’re more than electrified meat, and my experience tells me that it is transformation, not mathematical balance, that life tends towards. Even the candle analogy doesn’t satisfy, because the flame isn’t completely gone; fire is energy, and as we all learn in grade school, energy can’t be created or destroyed – only changed.
Of course, I know that this is an insoluble problem. I could dwell on this question indefinitely, and still be no further along until the day I received practical knowledge, as we all eventually must.
The conclusion I inevitably reach is that nothing regarding any existence after death is certain, but what I do know is that I am alive today, at the moment that I write this. I believe that what we do now has meaning, so we must do what we can to make it mean something good. And the goodbyes don’t have to outnumber the hellos, if we keep looking for ways to meet new people and things.
One last thing before I go: if you’re having thoughts about whether or not to continue living, I hope you will give it another day. And then another, and so on. If you need to talk to someone, do that: https://988lifeline.org/ is one good option.
