We almost always talk about death like it’s an accident, as if, however inevitable, it could still be avoided. This is as true for car crashes as it is for colon cancer, when the inevitability of death is obscured by the discussion of cancer prevention screenings, and the importance of diet and exercise. By focusing on what could have prevented each individual death, we blind ourselves to the general trend.
I know people who, if they were told they had an hour to live, would check their email one last time to see what they might have missed.
On oblivion’s lip, age is irrelevant. You’ll always feel too young.
Humanity’s awareness of death is meant to be one of our defining characteristics, and yet death is so rarely discussed. Inappropriate in almost every situation, it’s often only smuggled into thought by being packaged in a joke. What makes us human isn’t our awareness of death, but the effort we expend to avoid our awareness.
Daily we sidestep that inevitable shhhh.
Death is what renders the meaningful meaningless. Repeating “Ashes to ashes…” doesn’t turn them to gold.
There’s an optimistic line of thinking which says that death is what teaches us how to find meaning in life — that if to study philosophy is to learn how to die, then to study our death is to learn how to live — memento mori, they say — as if consideration of our mortality were a practical filter by which we could parse trivial distraction from actual meaningful action. YOLO, we say. Or, this is something I won’t regret in my grave. We say this while knowing we won’t be in our grave.
If it be now, 'tis not to come: if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. — Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2
But put yourself in the hospital bed; put yourself in the car before its fatal collision; put yourself in the garden when your heart retires early. What good is your readiness then? Just put yourself in the very last minute of your life, wherever that may be. You will not feel any braver for having written a great novel. You will not feel any the less for having wasted so many Sundays watching Netflix in bed.
“When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy?” Cormac McCarthy’s John Sheddan in The Passenger.
“Wherever you debark was the train’s destination all along. I’ve studied much and learned little. I think that at the least one might reasonably wish for a friendly face. Someone at your bedside who does not wish you in hell.” Sheddan, again.
Me, to my brother: Life is but the hunt for more enduring illusions.
This is my re-formulation of the Didion line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That idea gets parroted as some grand elevation of fiction, when really, it’s nihilism distilled to its essence. Without our stories, there’d be no reason to live. The world does not offer us a coat for the cold.
All metaphors of death violate the terror which constitutes oblivion. It won’t be like a dark house, or a shadow land, or a country from whose bourn no traveler returns. It won’t be like anything at all.
The only consolation I’ve ever found is knowing that everyone before us has done it, and everyone we know will have to do it as well, and whether they died well or not is irrelevant. They all managed to do it somehow.