Like most people, your awareness of what is to come is paired with a profound reluctance to confront it, whatever "it' might be. Perhaps you have penned a will or taken great care in purchasing a cemetery plot. But chances are, you have not yet pursued the most important and rewarding of all tasks: engaging in a dialogue with death.
Throughout our lives we participate in the denial of the soul, desperately chasing after the fleetness of life as if that bright spark of human endurance were our eternity. In the midst of our existence infatuation, those we love and those we hate fall to inevitable death, perhaps blocking our way. We pause, we look, we remember briefly; then look away as if death never came.
We learn nothing of death in the wake of our early years as immortal children except the giddy power a child has to inflict death on lowly creatures; an ant crushed beneath the heel of a shoe or the wings torn from a butterfly in an effort to understand flight. Death has no place in the school room amongst the gods. Decay and morbidity has no place in our foundling bed, for immortals have no need for that morbid subject.
The seriousness of death only reaches us when the reality of our dust-to-dust nature finds us in old age searching for a final resting ground. When we live outside the reality of death, its finality brings many wishes and regrets. In the course of my career, the words I have heard most often are "I Wish?.
Throughout our lives we participate in the denial of the soul, desperately chasing after the fleetness of life as if that bright spark of human endurance were our eternity. In the midst of our existence infatuation, those we love and those we hate fall to inevitable death, perhaps blocking our way. We pause, we look, we remember briefly; then look away as if death never came.
We learn nothing of death in the wake of our early years as immortal children except the giddy power a child has to inflict death on lowly creatures; an ant crushed beneath the heel of a shoe or the wings torn from a butterfly in an effort to understand flight. Death has no place in the school room amongst the gods. Decay and morbidity has no place in our foundling bed, for immortals have no need for that morbid subject.
The seriousness of death only reaches us when the reality of our dust-to-dust nature finds us in old age searching for a final resting ground. When we live outside the reality of death, its finality brings many wishes and regrets. In the course of my career, the words I have heard most often are "I Wish?.