Now that I’m 47, I’ve been considering extra usually about dying. The truth that it really occurs. To everybody. It’s such a wild factor that we don’t usually speak straight about (even on this web site, the place we speak about all the things, it’s been two years since, and five years before that). And what occurs after we die? Nobody is aware of, after all, however do you’ve got concepts/guesses/beliefs?
Earlier than falling asleep at evening, I generally notice, in a profound method, how everlasting dying is — it takes a second for it to sink in after which BANG! — and I’ll all of a sudden panic and need to talk about fruit salad. Or hyperfocus on necklaces to determine which kinds I like greatest. Or ponder whether or not yogurt or applesauce make the higher substitute in the event you don’t have sufficient eggs whereas baking.
Fill in any variety of on a regular basis distractions to maintain from realizing that dying, as my beloved dad says, “occurs to one of the best of us.”
Do you do the identical? Years in the past, I requested what hobbies folks had, and a reader answered, “existential dread.” On the time, it made me giggle, however now I very a lot relate.
***
When my friend died this summer season, he did depart us, however he’s additionally so current in my thoughts, and naturally in his kids’s minds, that he nonetheless generally appears with us within the room, carrying his beanie and suggesting all of us go to the diner. I do know he’s gone, however he’s so alive in our ideas — make it make sense? This sensation jogged my memory of the late poet Andrea Gilbert’s love letter to their spouse: “My love, I used to be so fallacious. Dying is the alternative of leaving. Once I left my physique, I didn’t go away. That portal of sunshine was not a portal to elsewhere, however a portal to right here. I’m extra right here than I ever was earlier than. I’m extra with you than I ever may have imagined. So shut you look previous me when questioning the place I’m. It’s okay. I do know that to be human is to be farsighted. However really feel me now, strolling the chambers of your coronary heart, urgent my palms to the comfortable partitions of your residing. Why did nobody inform us that to die is to be reincarnated in these we love whereas they’re nonetheless alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I’ll reply, ‘How tall are you?’”
So, is poetry how we come to phrases with grief, with loss, with concern of dying? Is loving our youngsters and associates a form of answer? Or ought to I simply consider that complete yogurt vs. applesauce state of affairs?
***
If the reply is poetry, then I provide you with Gone From My Sight by Henry van Dyke:
I’m standing upon the seashore. A ship, at my facet,
spreads her white sails to the shifting breeze and begins
for the blue ocean. She is an object of magnificence and power.
I stand and watch her till, at size, she hangs like a speck
of white cloud simply the place the ocean and sky come to mingle with one another.
Then, somebody at my facet says, “There, she is gone.”
Gone the place?
Gone from my sight. That’s all. She is simply as massive in mast,
hull and spar as she was when she left my facet.
And, she is simply as in a position to bear her load of residing freight to her destined port.
Her diminished dimension is in me — not in her.
And, simply in the mean time when somebody says, “There, she is gone,”
there are different eyes watching her coming, and different voices
able to take up the glad shout, “Right here she comes!”
And that’s dying…
How calming and delightful is that? It jogs my memory of my grandmother.
Lastly, Freddie as soon as teared up telling me that, if he dies first, to consider this stanza from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:
I bequeath myself to the filth to develop from the grass I really like,
If you’d like me once more search for me below your boot-soles.
You’ll hardly know who I’m or what I imply,
However I shall be good well being to you however,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first preserve inspired,
Lacking me one place search one other,
I cease someplace ready for you.
My beating coronary heart.
Now, please inform me, how do you consider dying? What do you assume occurs afterward, if something? How do you distract your self from this elementary reality, or, as an alternative, flip towards it? I’d actually love to listen to.
P.S. Extra on loss, together with the Dead Dad Club and how to talk to kids about death. And everything you do is good.
