The Death of Me

I've been thinking a lot about death this life, and I still don't understand it. Not the physiology of it (though my understanding of how the human body works is rudimentary and fractured) or the psychology of those who survive it (for a little bit of time, anyway). Those are fairly clear. For many, death invokes what Shakespeare wrote in King John. In Constance's words:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

Fare you well: had you such a loss as I,

I could give better comfort than you do.

I will not keep this form upon my head,

When there is such disorder in my wit.

O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!

My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!

My widow-comfort, and my sorrows' cure!

 It isn't mourning that I'm writing about this morning, it's more a befuddlement at death itself. In a not-so-unique observation, I recognize that life is built on a foundation of death, one which life is destined to become through the singular expectation of time. I still believe the meaning of life is, in part, tucked into Hamlet's four words: "The readiness is all," that being prepared for the permanent departure is what we have with the time allotted. But death weighs on me, despite being far from it.

I think about it when I eat food--because, regardless of your vegetarian/vegan/carnivorous/omnivorous diet, the death of something else is the continuation of your life. I think about it when I'm alone. I fear what I will do when it visits my home, who it will claim first, and dread the regret I know I will have when I have to close a lid on someone I love. I think about it as I teach of atrocities, when I try to remind students of the validity and brevity of life, all the while trying to practice what I preach and teach in positivity--defining a thing by what it is, not what it is not. I find opposites useful in undermining rather than defining, where up is up because it up, not because it isn't down, and I recognize the failure my language has even in defining my definitions in the negative space.

I wonder at the idea of tangible immortality, rather than the promises afar off from ancient texts cleped holy. Do we value human life because we know it won't remain? If immortality is a possibility--divinely or digitally--then do we cease to care about the human, in much the way surfeit leads to uninterest? Could we step from here to forever and still be who we are? Do I want an infinity without who I am--and does that include the negatives? Am I composed entirely of positive claims, of things that I am rather than things I am not? Does erasing my flaws in some sort of perfection mean I've erased some of me? Or are those imperfections made perfect create the real me? If I'm not real now, how will I be real later? Is the death of me not the death of my body but the death of what I have known to be me? Is that what a resurrection is? Or are flaws beauty-like and only skin deep?

I am beginning to taste the bitterness of death on the back of my tongue and I feel it creep into the veins of my thoughts. The more I learn, the less I know, and I'm coming to understand that I know nothing in the vast glory of living. And I don't know if I can love the glory of the world if it is constructed on the bones of our inevitable silence.

I don't know if I have any choice.