On endings and facing death

When considering death, there’s so much we tell ourselves, and so much we don’t. We see our lives in our stories, and so we tell the story of our lives to understand its ending. If the story was cut short, if it didn’t turn out how we expected, we get angry. We see what the book could have been, but it just ends. And we can’t forget it.

We can feel so strong in our own story of who we are and what we’re doing, we feel invincible against something as strange as death. How could the story go on without us, or without that beloved person? A life can be defined more by a person in it than by the sky and the grass and the sea. So how can it keep going if that person is suddenly gone? Why doesn’t it all fall down, why doesn’t the whole world change to fill the void?

It’s hard to believe that just a moment, just a small movement or a brief turn could suddenly be the end of all that. All that meaning wrapped up inside fragile little bags of flesh and water and bones. A child could just push a single blade into your throat, and all of a sudden all those memories, all those feelings, all those plans, all those hopes and thoughts and once in creation uniqueness is just bleeding out all over the floor. In a few minutes it’s gone, and nothing can stop it or put it back, it just happens as easy as falling asleep, and no thought or plan or meaning can put it back in place. And it’s just gone.

Death is so unfamiliar. The body is so still compared to just moments before. All the life, all the meaning that animated that thing in front of you, just suddenly gone. And somehow the thing is still there. But it’s not you any more. And how can that be? What were you? Where did you go in an instant? In death we see ourselves as we will one day be. But it won’t be us, we can’t understand how that could be us, because that’s not them. But it’s a cruel reminder, almost a joke. To see it lying so still, so perfect, but none of them is there.

Some people have said that death is part of living. We grow and change and lose something that made life worth having. Or at least we hope we do before the end comes. We don’t want to let go until we’ve stopped caring to hold on. We have children, we live on through them. We make way for the rest who have to love their lives, have the moments, their stories, their meaning. But all we want is to keep this tiny flame alive of consciousness that still sees what is happening.

Even when we picture death, we imagine that spark persisting somehow, that point of reflection that knows it is a thing, a unique point in all the universe, uniquely singular and distinct because it sees itself and knows itself to be. We imagine it in another place, the afterlife, as a spirit or a ghost or reincarnated into another experience or rejoining the river of creation. But we long for that spark to be itself something real. We see it vanish and we don’t know where it goes. We don’t know where it came from or what it even was. But it was everything for us, for all of us, and we just wanted to keep it going a bit longer. How can something that is everything be so little understood? How can it vanish leaving no hole behind? Wasn’t it something real, so that it still goes on somewhere?

Life is a repeating cycle of birth and death, and each of us is just the latest moment in a long chain of lives leading to us as it’s point, and then on beyond us. And we fall into the darkness behind with all the rest that came before. They’ve lost their say, their stake, their meaning, because they just aren’t here any more. And they aren’t coming back. And soon we go to join them. And we make those who will go after, and will one day join us.

And, in a way, there is only one life of humankind. It is always lived in the present, which changes, but it is one life, one ever changing moment we make the life of humanity present in. Our forebears hand it on to us and we to our children. Life passes from one pair of hands to the next, and we each hold it in our moment. And nothing can make it stay when it’s our time to let go and give it up to the next hands.

We try to write our stories so someone will understand, so some part of what we were goes on. Or we work to secure our children’s future, to survive in them, to imprint ourselves and our love and what we did into them so that it lasts and lives on in them. But they will walk a path beyond us, and they will pass too. And it’s all a chase to provide for the next ones who will provide for the next. Lives sacrificed for lives that are themselves sacrifices. Where does the buck stop, the value land? Where is the thing that keeps, that it was all for? If not for any particular life? There will always be a next life.

Some think if they build something up, it will survive and keep their meaning alive. But in a short amount of time no one remains who even knew you, much less cared. The wheel grinds on, and what you store up in life is lost in the conplications of time and choices that you cannot predict or determine.

Life proliferates so much that it breeds death. Life spreads and finds purchase so easily. In every hole, in every pocket and nook and cranny of the world, a different life is lived, so easily the spaces are filled up. And all that life teeming everywhere breeds death by necessity. It’s so easy to make a unique life, and so easy to end it. And so hard to live it in between.

Some think that if they could just create something truly wonderful, something that would be loved, that would last, that would keep their meaning alive. A song, a painting, a poem, a story. Even a person. A moment of creative beauty. A moment of being God, bringing something wonderful and new into the world. Somethat that would touch people and reach beyond the years and the wall of infinite separation of loss, to see again what that person saw and felt what they felt, to touch some part of them still alive in their creation, and love it. To be known and loved after the hand that wrote the letters is gone, wouldn’t that be everything?

To lay down the chance to control the story, the chance to change where it goes is so hard. And life robs us of dignity and agency by starting to steal it from us long before we’re even gone. Our world and the people in it are rushing forward, ever younger, ever more fixed in living their own paths through their moment, as our moment fades. It’s easy to see why some get detached, others bitter, others desperate, and some content.

When we’re young we’re content to let those before us guide us and steer our lives, and who we will be is all ahead of us. When we’re old we’re content to let the past be what it was the future what it will be, in the care of those who come after us, and who we became is behind us. And in between we strife and struggle and cry hot tears and wonder how we will get from moment to moment and try to wrestle our story to the ground, so it will be what we want it to be and we will be who we imagined ourselves to be. Every moment our potential is being swallowed up by what we actually became and what we did and didn’t do, and it’s eating us alive trying to make it be worth it. To be what we imagined.

And every day we have to take care of the same things, food and drink and sleep and cleaning, all the animal needs our bodies won’t let us live without. And sometimes that all we have. Sometimes we spend our lives just trying to have enough to be alive, and don’t have time to ask what it was for. What the meaning was. Why something with such amazing potential, something able to see and know itself for what it was, could never know itself for anything more than just trying to exist.

And at the end of life, when all we’re doing is just surviving for one day more, one day more of those animal duties, what kind of life is that? How can we live with it except that nothing on Earth can stop it from being so.

We tell so many stories of where we came from and where we’re going. We live in those stories, or hope we do. And what is life but meaning? Atoms and molecules are everywhere. But life is meaning. Shapes in DNA that mean something, that have a significance and direction and purpose. Structures in proteins that have purpose, direction, significance, function within a larger concept. Blind matter is nothing, does nothing, has no care or purpose or direction.

But somehow this thing we call life has meaning. Symbolism and purpose and story built right into its fabric. Vast libraries of it, information, intent, purpose, an idea in even the smallest cell. Written into something so small it can’t even be seen is all that story, all those instructions and details and tiny symbols that signify something enormous. All of you, in there. In just a flake of skin you can’t even see. And when it’s separated from the locus of that meaning, a moment of time and space and matter and energy and significance, its body, then it dissolves back into the sea of blind matter. Its meaning dissolves out of it; it gets too far away from the animating essence of the life of humanity in your moment, and it’s gone. That bit was once you. Part of you. Now it’s just nothing, just blind matter left behind, gone still, all the purpose and energy and meaning gone out of it.

And in that moment we see the separation to come. Somehow we die by a million cuts every day and survive, each of us shedding and dissolving back into the universe, but somehow we survive it. We take in new matter, new energy, and imprint it with our meaning, our name, our purpose and essence. And we remain. But not forever. One day we can’t keep up the cycle, and in a breath all of it is lost, all in a moment, and we say that life has gone.

The very nature of life is meaning. And even though it is all we are, we still don’t know how to control it. We can’t grasp it or catch it in a bottle. We can only hand it on, that spark, somehow, for someone else to carry and use. We make the unique meaning that will be them. So easily we make it, so easily begin it, set it growing. What is it that it wants to exist so much, to catch fire and spread so easily? What is it that is so desperate to be, but cannot make itself stay? It’s a fire that burns in us, that we light between us and spread across history and across worlds.

There’s little point in talking about how we can accept death. It doesn’t ask to be accepted. It simply takes us. Slowly, or in just a moment. It pulls us in so surely and steadily that even the strongest merely imagine they have any power to resist its pull. It is the eternal fisherman that always lands its catch. It takes from us, and nothing can pull back what it has taken. When the line comes for us, we will go with it too. Nothing shakes loose that silver hook. The strongest, the smartest, the most precious, all are spent in an instant and taken, no matter what we might say or think or feel or do. The victory is so complete that no battlefield even remains on which to surrender or reflect. The victim is just gone, only to linger for a while in memory. And every moment fading from the life of humankind.

When I look at my children, the miracle of that life seems most precious and amazing, worth more than the whole world. And when I see them and I know that the gift I’ve passed on is only temporary, that I can’t promise them myself forever, or even themselves forever, it tears the universe in half for me.

My one comfort is the thought that I won’t have to be there to watch them leave the world, because I don’t think I could bear watching the best thing in the world leave it. And yet even that comfort isn’t a promise. For much of humanity’s life we’ve been watching our children die. We’ve made it more rare, because we have seen how terrible an injustice it is and have demanded that that, at least, be minimized to provide some dignity for our species. To not have to witness the life we made to go after us end before we must leave.

I can speak many words of kindness to my children, tell them their story will live on, or that such things are too far away to worry about. But none of us knows, for certain, where we came from, what we even are, or where we go. None of us knows how far or close that day may be for any of us. But we can’t live our lives like the world we live in is true. We live inside the story that life is, that life tells about itself.

That’s the essence of life, and that is what it is at its highest, most developed form in us: our story, our meaning of who and what we are. Either the world is a farce, our meaning an accidental phenomenon, a cruel joke on a small peculiarity in one blind corner of the universe, a story that tells itself and sees itself, a story with no reader, soon to disappear back into the sea of nothing that birthed it without intention. Or the story, the meaning, is somehow real. It exists, it lives, it is part of the essence of creation. The soul is something, is for something, not merely an accidental meta-phenomena arising from the action of underlying physical and survival mechanisms that operate for God knows what reason in a world of blind, dead mechanism.

Why should life bother? What is it trying to accomplish? Why seek to survive unless there is some purpose in survival, something worth preserving? And yet that meaning does exist in some way, does strive to survive. And in us, sees itself for what it is, but does not know what it is. I am I, and I know almost nothing else. Before all else, I know only life, only purpose, only my story, only meaning. All else comes after.

And within my story I see how it is caught in an unfeeling web of the mechanisms of an existence I can’t fully fathom nor change. Some inevitable, inscrutable clockwork of forces and energy and mathematics and probabilities and matter in which I am but a passing phenomenon. But we can’t live in that world if we’re to live. Whatever kind of thing this creature of meaning and story is, it can’t survive in that world. It can’t make sense of it, can’t function or operate or understand according to its rules, even if it must bow down to them. Life must be lived inside itself, from within its own nature. And its nature is the story of our lives.

So what are we to make of death? Shall we just tell the story that makes it most comforting to walk toward it until the day when all such discussions are moot? Shall we rail against the injustice of it, the shock and confusion and how it defies and rips apart the fabric of everything we understand about our own truest existence? Shall we spend our lives fighting to delay it or escape it, only to be caught all the same in the end? Shall we build monuments to ourselves in the hope that they will somehow carry on the life our bodies cannot?

We are all eternally asking ourselves, how can we live with this? And we’re all left without a choice about it overtaking us, whatever answer we come up with. In a situation like ours, the most certain of us are often the most comforting, and the most troubling. You can’t help but feel better hearing from someone who knows for sure. And you can’t help but wonder how they can be so sure, when the mystery and shock and finality of every death tests every story we tell ourselves. It raises a question about our very existence that we can’t answer while in it, and any story that isn’t the least bit shaken doesn’t really appreciate the problem. And if it does understand the problem, how can it pretend to solve it?

For myself, I have to recognize that I don’t have an answer. Not one that I can prove and lay out perfectly, one that solves the problem that is the heart of human existence. I only know that I love life and want it to continue, whatever it may hold. I only wish I could have more of it, and could increase my part in it through the creation of more life and beauty, more children, more great works of art and intellect, more gifts of what life has given me to give to others. And I realize that I’m small, and not so unique, and not so important, even though, inside my own story, my life seems like the whole world. And I love my children, and I wish I could promise them that death was just a joke, and made no sense for the sort of things we are, in the world of what life and the human soul truly is.

But I can’t honestly tell them that. Death is something we all will have to face. They will, most likely, have to face my death. I can’t spare them from that separation. And even though I would give everything to do so, I can’t spare them from that pain. Those pains that, according to the Bible, made God himself suffer and shed tears. Even the book that claims to have the answers sees death for the ultimate punishment and humiliation that it is. A violation of the nature of our truest selves. The body full of meaning, of life, of the soul, that has it stripped away and left empty.

So, like Ecclesiastes, I end with no solution, only the satisfaction of having spoken honestly about the questions, the fears, the hopes, the pains. We do not have the power to stop life from taking things away from us. We can only tell our story as truly as we can and fill our story with as much love and life and meaning each day as we can. We can only strive to keep our hearts open and our stories growing as long as we can.

So kiss the ones you love, hold them close. They won’t be here forever, and neither will you. But as life is about meaning and meaning inspires love, the love of life is love for the heart of what we are, beautiful and terrible as it may be. We can’t hide from it, nor retreat from it nor escape it. We can only live within its truest heart. And make our stories and those around us as rich and full of meaning as they can be.