Two ways of looking at death

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the idea that different people need different advice. Or that the same person needs different advice at different times.

One direction goes:

Life is fragile. Our personalities, our minds, our futures are all carried via a piece of meat. It’s so easy for something to disrupt the body and destroy all that. Unless we eventually upload ourselves or something, our bodies will fail us all. Holy shit.

Another direction goes:

We can’t live with that knowledge in the front of our minds; it’s too traumatic. We can only function if we can set it aside. (If you need that direction, probably just skip the rest of this post.)

I try to wobble between these. To ignore the reality of death is to miss a very important fact, one that should shape some decisions. But it’s debilitating to think too much about the fact that everyone I love will die. I don’t want to be so bogged down that I miss the goodness of life. 

………

My father’s father died on a day when he had left for work without saying goodbye to his family. When I was growing up, my father required us to say goodbye when leaving for the day; the implication was that any of us might die during the day. At some point I realized that was kind of dark, but I think it wasn’t a bad thing to be mindful of.

A lot of things are tinged with pre-nostalgia for me. These might be the good times I’ll long for later.

I find it especially paralyzing to think about all the ways young children can die, things they can choke on and fall off of. I periodically look up the child mortality rate (6.3 deaths of under-5s per 1000 live births in the US) because my brain otherwise thinks it must be so much higher.

……….

Last week my uncle died unexpectedly during a family vacation. One day he was there, cracking jokes and talking about upcoming music projects, and the next day he wasn’t.

When our youngest was born, Jeff carried her around the kitchen saying, “This loaf of bread is older than you! These bananas are older than you!” First there was not a person, and then there was.

Friday evening I did the reverse. This shirt on the table — he took it off just hours ago to go swimming. This salad he cut the vegetables for — it’s not even wilted. I took apart his flute to put it in its case, the flute he’d played a night or two before, the flute he’d never play again.

……….

Whichever way you need to wobble — be kind, and enjoy each other.

……….

Related:
Life is short, Paul Graham
Your life in weeks, Tim Urban
Our bodies, our selves? me