The Lack of and Presence of Imminence in the World

So few people in this world get to choose the way that they die. Yet it is inevitable; each person will grow older- for some not perhaps old...but older- and then pass into the next level of human existence. We try to flair this up with speeches of the afterlife, heaven, hell, what have you. I can almost see teenage girls decorating their ideas of death with flashy tassels and stickers, just to make this universal ideal palatable. Something that every person who ever will exist will experience, and yet we shy from it like it is something untouchable and foreign. Everyone will touch it. The only true question in life is when?

But, back to my original thought: few people get to choose the manner in which they lose themselves to the openness (or closedness) of the infinite future. Only those who seek it, who take their bodies made of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and push it past the barriers of life. Suicide. What a word. Apparently sues means oneself in Latin. I know that -cide indicates the ending, or murder of an individual. But is suicide really the ending of your life? Or is it just the (forgive my gaming reference) forced respawn of yourself, your identity, your thoughts and dreams into a new form? If death is a new beginning, is suicide just a jump start into a new life, new everything?

And the infinite future. It sounds daunting. A professor once said that when he was in Catholic school, nuns would try to scare him by holding his finger over a candle and asking if it burned. When he finally relented and said that it hurt, they would say that the fires of hell would be a million times hotter, all over his body, forever. It would never end, never get better, and never ever change. Forever. The timeline of forever will surpass the amount of time it took for the planet to form, life to begin changing, dinosaurs walking, butterflies breaking free from the darkness of their chrysalis. Millions of billions of years. Quadrillions, trillions of quadrillions of years. And death is something you reach after approximately a century.


Before I stray too much, I want you to try to grasp this. Feel each second draining past you, falling, sliding, groaning all around you. Feel yourself trapped in the amount of time it takes for your heart to beat again. Infinity. Something that so many people ink their bodies with. A sideways figure 8 that manages to encompass the idea of a never ending thought, or feeling. A sentience. A thought, an ideal. Much like "0", infinity is not a thing we can touch. But 0 is not as scary. I have one cat. Six months ago, I had no cats. I will never have infinitely many cats, however. (Not that I think that owning infinitely  many cats is a good, viable idea.) Infinity is something nobody can wrap their mind around. It is something that does not physically exist. Everything comes to an end, and everything has it's number. Yet, after a measly handful of years, days, hours...we expect a vast nothingness of everything?

 

I saw a movie where the main characters face death prematurely. Fatal diseases. They both face their impending upheaval with dignity and regret; they do not want to leave each other behind, their families behind, or the life that they shared. They believed (as much as one could tell) that they would meet again, but they wrote one another's eulogies, a promise that this would only be a bookmark in a chapter of a long story, a slip of paper folded in half, untouched by the years and yet old beyond measure. It was beautiful and profoundly wrong at the same time. They knew that they were not long for this world, and did not waste time in expressing their feelings for each other. But by the same token, no teenagers should look on their death with such inevitable certainty. They did.

 

My best friend's grandfather died a year or two ago. He was told he had months to live over twenty years ago. He set his affairs somewhat in order, choosing to rearrange things as necessary. He had leukemia. After all of this, he died of brain cancer. He was a resilient man, a man who kept his ideals and beliefs until his mind wandered to where nobody could follow. But, nobody told his granddaughter that he had died. She missed his funeral, his memorial, and her inheritance was swept under the rug. His house was cleaned out by a child he had not been on the best terms with, and family possessions were thrown out. Who knows what happened to his precious cats and dogs?

 

Before you start to look at this as a rant, take a moment and think. This is not a rant, but an outcry to the masses to think! If life shortchanges you as it has so many times before, will you be prepared for it? I am not proposing looking to every shadow in fear of the Reaper, but only that one takes the joys of human existence seriously and carefully. Live your life like it is your last day, but prepare for many ahead; and know that the end may just be the beginning to a future physically unimaginable. π