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Now that I’m 47, I’ve been thinking more often about death. The fact that it actually happens. To everyone. It’s such a wild thing that we don’t often talk directly about (even on this site, where we talk about everything, it’s been two years since, and five years before that). And what happens after we die? No one knows, of course, but do you have ideas/guesses/beliefs?
Before falling asleep at night, I sometimes realize, in a profound way, how permanent death is — it takes a moment for it to sink in and then BANG! — and I’ll suddenly panic and need to talk about fruit salad. Or hyperfocus on necklaces to figure out which styles I like best. Or contemplate whether yogurt or applesauce make the better substitute if you don’t have enough eggs while baking.
Fill in any number of everyday distractions to keep from realizing that death, as my beloved dad says, “happens to the best of us.”
Do you do the same? Years ago, I asked what hobbies people had, and a reader answered, “existential dread.” At the time, it made me laugh, but now I very much relate.
***
When my friend died this summer, he did leave us, but he’s also so present in my mind, and of course in his children’s minds, that he still sometimes seems with us in the room, wearing his beanie and suggesting we all go to the diner. I know he’s gone, but he’s so alive in our thoughts — make it make sense? This sensation reminded me of the late poet Andrea Gibson’s love letter to their wife: “My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s okay. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, ‘How tall are you?'”
So, is poetry how we come to terms with grief, with loss, with fear of death? Is loving our children and friends a kind of solution? Or should I just concentrate on that whole yogurt vs. applesauce situation?
***
If the answer is poetry, then I give you Gone From My Sight by Henry van Dyke:
I am standing upon the seashore. A ship, at my side,
spreads her white sails to the moving breeze and starts
for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck
of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.
Then, someone at my side says, “There, she is gone.”
Gone where?
Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast,
hull and spar as she was when she left my side.
And, she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me — not in her.
And, just at the moment when someone says, “There, she is gone,”
there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices
ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”
And that is dying…
How calming and beautiful is that? It reminds me of my grandmother.
Finally, Freddie once teared up telling me that, if he dies first, to think of this stanza from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
My beating heart.
Now, please tell me, how do you think about death? What do you think happens afterward, if anything? How do you distract yourself from this fundamental truth, or, instead, turn toward it? I’d really love to hear.
P.S. More on loss, including the Dead Dad Club and how to talk to kids about death. And everything you do is good.
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