Rhythm, Habit and Death
He wrote about it, and then, coincidentally, he did, too: death. It's the new black, and the oldest black in the book. Don't be judgy. Everyone does it.
Last night I read LOML's take on it; this morning I read Bob's version right before leaving the house. Out of the house and into a beautiful day, warm even at 8:00am, which is saying something for San Francisco on this side of the Summer Equinox.
It's not that I don't visit the topic of death at all; I'm sure I don't do it any more or any less than most people. I just don't take it that seriously. In and of itself, the notion of my own death is uncomfortable (though I'm sure there are are some who look forward to my demise), and not much more. Perhaps my mind recoils when it gets too on-topic for this topic, but that's not an entirely satisfying explanation. Inevitabilities pleasant and un-, instead, provide a certain comfort and I think that balances out the abject dread. It's that sort of "worry, don't worry; dread it, don't dread it...either way, it's going to happen.
It's going to happen and there's a good chance you won't be around to experience it.
Science, mathematics and the needs and tasks of a given day all conspire to blunt the trauma for me. The god-stuff never did it for me, perhaps because I'm not sure I ever really believed in it. Oh, I believed in, took comfort in the tribal (as in, "my tribe, my people") aspect because it was there to be taken. The afterlifey stuff, the promise of salvation, that strikes me as very B-movie, very "whistling past the graveyard", very Veronica Sawyer clasping hands over ears and singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb".
Science, you say? Math? Cold comfort! No, not really. Quite the opposite. Kurt Gödel has saved me a whole lot of time and effort considering the afterlife by pointing out the unknowableness of it. Not so strangely, there's also a demonstrable unknowability to God, Heaven, Hell and all those operatic themes.
So it's unknowable, so why bother trying? That's the point: I just don't, anymore.
Death is there; death will happen. I wonder sometimes if I will be conscious of the fact that I'm quickly dying and that I'll miss this Life (I do love it so much!), or that I'll be resigned to the End of Me, or whether I won't get the chance to do either because I'm sent to my Fate unexpectedly.
On balance, movies that show the passage of time, songs that sing of lifetime-sized intervals, really get to me. This movie has both song and deed that move quickly through time. Very poignant to me. Sometimes quite upsetting.
This morning, right after reading Bob's entry, death and dying on my mind, I walked into that warm San Francisco morning. And I recalled the first line I wrote in my private journal at 1:07pm on July 14, 1995: "My lover is dead. I have no use for sunshine." (Allen had been dead for exactly thirteen hours.)
Turns out, I did have a use for sunshine! I'll always have use for it because it reminds me that I'm still there to see it. Now that's something I can think about for the rest of my own forever.