Death

You'll die. Does it really matter when? A big promotion, recognition, your marriage day, bad weather -- waiting for these things is different. It matters when they happen. We organize our lives around them -- around, that is, with the preplan before and after. But death allows for no after. It might as well happen today or in forty-seven years.

You will die. Daddy Heidegger held that the realization of one's death is the beginning of life. His belief is true, but not exclusively true. How often a man has fallen in love with a woman who has been in his life for a ridiculously long amount of time. The blinders fall, come thou erotic click, and the whole world is seen again with her as its scintillating nucleous, a centrifugal center whose endless periphery is the endless universe. Death does not exist for those in love with life. At the most it can undermine, but its face never needs to be seen. And for those to whom it does exist, it exists only as a phantom. Never touched in its brute baseless blackness, but delusionally created, placebo-like, with each fear of it -- that is, fiction. To fear death, to even consider death a threat, is a symptom of a mal-lived life. To live is a continual oscillation between assertion and absorption, action and reward. To fear death is neither to act nor to be rewarded. To fear death is to sit.

The child who laughs, gloriously possessed with its laughter; the lovers intoxicated with their fresh-faced love; the naturalistic, meditative awe of the old, always content, secretly happy -- these are examples of life, and one cannot live without forgetting the falsity of death, and forgetting falsity is negative realization.

You will die. Imagine your death. I can imagine mine. It will be painful, perhaps, slow or sudden, or narcotically soft-served; perhaps cancer that ceaselessly rides your nerves, tormenting, tormenting, or perhaps a car crash that catches you before pain has a chance to. But you can't do a damn thing about it. This revelation is epiphanic, not miserable -- what comes by necessity comes by necessity; the necessary is the taken care of, and we have other things to do.

No matter how darkly you write it out, we precede death; death does not precede us. The singular moment where the biological process retires, we have already done so as well, somewhere between this moment and the one that precedes it, but never in the moment itself. Well then. The question of the hereafter. You will either cease to exist or live again. Thus stands the dialectic of death.

Live your life. Or you will die without dying. This is the death that can be tasted, but how often its realization passes us by; we, so busy with future plans, dead already. This is the life you can change. Live it.