Dealing with death is never a pleasant experience, and everyone has their own way of coping. Some people have their fantasy of heaven and how wonderful they know it will be someday. I envy those people. I truly resent the fact that I was born without the ability to put my faith into a concept as pleasing as heaven. Sadly people like me who don’t necessarily have religion are left to ponder the dark hole that a soul must slip into. I have always despised even allowing the thought of death to enter my head, even as a child, and even when I believed in the possibility of heaven. I never could really imagine heaven or what it would be like. I had my hopeful whimsy of lush vegetation and festivities, but I could never really bring myself to fully buy into to the theory. When I think about death now (as a cynical adult) it scares the living day lights out of me.
Once in a while I accidentally remember how mortal I am and how easily everything can slip away. I think about what it would be like to finally confront those last moments of your life, realizing that you are going to die, and slipping into the pure terror of the unknown…and then…nothing. The thought of not being able to see, hear, touch, or smell anything, and worst of all, not be aware of my lack of awareness is the most treacherous and terrifying thought that my brain can muster up. I think this is why each time I am faced with loss, I immediately feel sick to my stomach and have to force myself to mentally look away and divert my attention to anything else.
I can’t bear becoming even a second older, always knowing that I am coming ever closer to all of the losses I will suffer throughout my life, and then I will dreadfully arrive at my own inevitable demise. Once I am at the bitter end I fear I will still lack the comfort of knowing that there is something, anything that lies beyond my imagination. I know this morbid fear is partly due to my inability to comprehend something that is better than what I already have in front of me.
For all of life’s hardships, disappointments, and frustrations, a majority of what I struggle with is brought on by my own doing, or has been created in the very fabric of the society we live in. Even with all of the bad things, I still have a lot of charming and exquisite people, places, and things in the very life I live.
My walk to school today was the best I have had since moving to Richmond. It felt like the only weather I think could possibly exist in heaven. I didn’t want my walk home to end because the last thing I wanted was to face the reality of going into a building and sitting in front of a computer for several hours. When I experience situations like these, sometimes I think about dying. I wonder if when I am coming close to the end if I will remember walks on beautiful days when I was in college, hanging out with my family and playfully debating and picking on each other’s life choices, and having late night slumber parties with dear old friends who I don’t see often enough. In those final moments I imagine that even admitting defeat and going to work will probably seem just as wonderful…because I was living. I was alive. I could move around, make decisions, and do whatever I wanted. I could staple papers, eat almonds at my desk, and complain over the number of voicemails and emails I had. I could eat a pear on the way to school and then be jealous of all of the personal pan pizzas surrounding me in Anthropology class. I feel like when I am dying anything I did in life will seem like a better option than the one in front of me.
When taking English Literature last semester, one of my favorite poems was “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats. Yeats expresses his disdain for being stuck in a “dying animal,” and how he wished he could thrust his soul from his body and into a piece of art so it could live on and be admired forever:
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
I desperately and hopelessly miss the people I have lost, and I fear for where they are. I hope with every fiber of my being that they are floating around somewhere have the time of their afterlife.
“Frozen here on the ladder of my life”,
-Rosa
