Many of the people I know were introduced to death slowly. They, you know, looked at it from a distance a couple times a week, maybe it smashed into their window on a particularly windy day and left a mark. For others, it was sharp and painful, a cloud hanging over them every minute of every day, as they watched their parents, their children taking the hand of death and falling away at a moments notice. We've all lain awake at night, mulling over it, maybe sweating a bit, even feeling for a fleeting moment that we understand it, before it slaps us awake and shuffles eerily out the window. No one can successfully ignore death. Death is like one of those really wonderful teachers that has a unique relationship with each and every one of his or her students. The whole world is death's classroom. And attendance, as we all know, is mandatory.
When I was 7 years old, death decided to make a flamboyant crash landing right in front of my half-toothless, freckley face. I had just migrated from the colorful, explosive culture wonderland of my birthplace to the poetic cataract of quiet that is my current location. Death started out slow. I saw it creeping about in Hurricane Katrina's wake, waving coyly at our old friends and neighbors with fingers the size of a FEMA truck. Through rose-colored glasses, these things are nothing more than a bad dream. I knew I should be upset. I was. But only because I didn't understand what had happened. I tucked death's first attempt at a conversation into one of the empty folds of my tiny cranium and made things and talked to animals and sang and told stories and giggled. But death was still trying. This time, it won. First, my beloved four-year old rat died. She had developed an enormous tumor on her chest and died in surgery. I was devastated. I simply couldn't fathom why the whole world didn't just stop with her. Why I didn't stop. And then PEOPLE started stopping. My grandmother, my great-grandfather. I suddenly became terrified of stopping. I realized I would stop one day and couldn't do anything about it. By the time I was nine, I was obsessed with death. I would have panic attacks at ungodly hours. I wouldn't allow myself to be alone in a room with knives, or I would become petrified, tremble, push them away. I wanted so badly to know about death, know why it did what it did, know exactly what it felt like to stop. I was afraid I would stop myself. I thought about it. Not because I didn't want to live, because I didn't want to live without knowing.
It haunted me for a good long while. Then, right around my 15th birthday, things started to change. I realized there was no use spending the limited amount of time one has to live worrying about what will happen when one won't anymore. I started to identify what DID matter, what made life worth living, and most importantly, what a gift it was just to be alive. All the time I would have been spending fretting about my own mortality and that of others was now open for recognizing other mysterious and/or unbelievable things. I made it my mission to search for the beauty in every concept, being, or situation I come across, and to help others do the same. I suddenly had time for kindness. There is something so very nourishing, so intensely gratifying, about coaxing out smiles or laughter or even tears of joy in others. Thus, I reached a certain peace. And this peace helped me to understand, from my own perspective, an essential facet of death's great mystery. It is this-
If I were to die this very minute, without warning, I would not have been cheated. Firstly,Because I've chosen to have faith that one person's tragedy might just be another's Shrodinger-esque opportunity. In other words, my hypothetical death could by extension contribute to the discovery of a cure for cancer eleven galaxies away -more on this in a future post ;)- Or maybe the equilibrium of the universe is being disturbed by the fact that my right foot is bigger than my left foot (fact) and it's just got to go. It's probably not even that complicated. But I choose to believe that good and evil are balanced in the grand scheme of things. Even if life sucks sometimes and I get super crazy upset and depressed about it. We've all got that right. We're not the Universe. We can't possibly understand the reasons behind the horrible/wonderful things that happen. Especially not death.
This is not to say that I haven't got a whole lot of living left to do, or that I don't still lay awake at night thinking about death or panicking about it till it drives me crazy, or that I don't have years and years of things to offer to the world as a whole. It's just that Death is not a criminal. Death does what death must do in order to offer the gift of life again and again. Death is an essential element in maintaining the balance of the Universe. And the second revelation I had is that because I have facilitated happiness, and I have given of myself to make life as beautiful a thing as I can for anyone and everyone I can, and thus, myself... I have lived. And if a life has not been wasted, if a life has been spent learning and giving and doing and growing to that life's fullest capacity, death is not merely the cutting of a thread. It is in fact the completion of a marvelous tapestry, to hang beside others of its kind eternally in a massive mural of intricate stitching, indeed more magnificent than any of us can begin to comprehend.
I leave you today with a fractal giraffe:
Go forth and be wonderful.
