Mortality and thinking clearly about it

We'll here's a cheerful post for a Sunday morning, but I think it's worth the effort to try to think clearly about the thing that unites us with our dogs, our goldfish and our daisies, and that is that we all stop living at some point (not sure about aspidistras though, as I think mine is about 100 years old). There is a nice scene in Kill Bill 2, where Bill explains how his little daughter stood on the Goldfish to see what would happen. One moment alive, the next dead.

 Mortality is not an easy thing for most of us to get into our brains, because it works against the very brain that is doing the thinking. But logically we know that we are all doing to die, and that everyone we love will die too. And that everyone who has ever lived before us died and that everyone who will ever live in the future will also die. It is part of our nature and if all living things.

But up against all logical evidence is the difficulty of imagining our own demise because we may briefly understand the moment of our demise but not understand or perceive anything after that (religious beliefs notwithstanding - and surely any perception on that side would be of a different and angelic nature🙂)

Often the sudden reminder of our mortality is the hardest thing for new cancer patients to deal with because they feel that their number has been called ("come in number 49, your time is up!" as they say on the boating pond). And there are lots of other things for that patient to deal with on top of mortality. 

For me the last two years have given me a crash course in the subject, and I have seen someone die well, as Cro did. You don't have to feel acceptance in order to at least feel acknowledgement. And the last weeks and months of your life can be the most meaningful, not the most terrifying. 

I don't wish my own death forwards, but feel I will enjoy life more if I at least let it enter the room. 

I do have a rather philosophical objection to the concept of 'death' as a thing at all. It's rather the end of life than the start of a different thing. It's just the time when all our processes stop and we become raw material for more life and more matter.

There is a song I may have mentioned, called 'Order and Chaos', which expresses this idea better than I can. Give it a listen.

order and chaos

I also found that something my friend Pat said was quite 'balancing' . Pat worked as a hospice doctor, by the way. She said after Cro died that Cro was on exactly the same path as all of us, just a little bit further along it. I agree.