I can’t ever remember it being there before, I never once looked up, straining my eyes into the distance and wondered what was that thing shimmering in the distance, not once. But that all changed on my birthday; the 12th of December last year when I became 65 years a human, it was there, a haze in the distance, it was some way off, but unmistakeable; it was the finish line.
It wasn’t real, it was in my mind, which was a more unnerving reality, imagined but unknown, real but unreal, not like a memory from the past but a projection to the future, as real as a full stop to a sentence.
Someone much brighter than me once said that there is only one truth in life; and that truth; is death. Now, that seems a pretty stark ponderous reality, but nothing matches that statement in vulgar realism.
Regardless of who you are, whether a street begger, a fund manager, politician, rock star, royalty or President, religious or athiest regardless of whether you love or hate, kill or nurture, decide on the fate of nations or the colour of a hand bag; one day, or one night we, all of us, will draw our last breath and in doing so; be cast into the great void beyond; we will die.
It seems strange that when we enter this world in that messy and physically industrial process, there are any number people keen to know every cute detail of the new entity; “girl or boy” this sets in motion an analysis of the offsprings future based on the physical attributes of the two involved in production. “How much did it weigh” Above six pounds the question is rapidly followed by a sharp intake of breath and a pinched lemon sucking face reflecting the pain and stretch level endured by the delivery unit. Child birth is viewed in society as an event to be celebrated, fawned on as a miracle, an event so spectacular as to render the parents into a mindless orgy of questionable purchases such as cribs, tasteless baby clothes, technologically diverse car seats, distraction toys of every sound and colour of the hallucinogenic spectrum; yet death, by contrast is something completely different; its black. Turn up at a funeral in a multi coloured Hawaiian shirt or a light summer floral skirt armed with a bottle of bubbly or a six pack, its fair to say you will be viewed with some distain; because death and funerals have only one colour and one mood; black.
There is no room for frivolity in death, no notion of gayety, there’s nothing funny about death, it come cloaked in fear and foreboding; but take a look at birth from another perspective, the very act of introducing a human into this life is by definition, condemns that joyous bundle of vomit and shit; to death.
Baby ‘showers’ and christenings are places of colour, vibrancy and joy, funerals are places of black, restraint and tears. There are few things more sombre than the place where we commit someones mortal remnants to ashes or deliver them to the earth. Yet its where we will all go, there’s no escaping the fact that one day, its you in a box on a tasteless velour drape being slowly transported into a furnace burning at 1800 degree F or with the touch of a button efficiency, lowered into the wormy earth in a box made to look like mahogany (but is in fact cheap pressed board). These are facts from which no one escapes, there is no argument to deny it, no force to exclude us….so why the long face?
Death is life greatest mystery, it has provoked poets, song writers and artists of all persuasion to sing, speak in hushed couplets, draw and chisel the image of death in stone. Its mystery provokes religions of the almost 3 thousand varieties to glorify or regale it. Death is the hot topic that no-one talks about.
Heres some fun death statistics to cheer you up; since Homo sapiens transformed from knuckle dragging apes to homo Erectus, over 100 billion of us have died, to put that into context; that’s a lot of people.
There are around 8 billion of us currently in various stages of dying today so the dead really do outweigh the living.
If you are the sentimental type, you can request the ashes of the departed to be returned to you in any number of vases or box configurations.. At this stage you weigh about 6 pounds of ash, if your dearly departed favoured gold teeth, you can even have them returned to you too. The departed become a kind of cadaver reclamation yard.
You can even have your carbon ashes turned into a diamond; half a cup of your loved ones ashes scooped from the ceremonial vase will produce a 5 carat diamond, which is an impressive ring to show off to your friends.
On average a human life lasts for about 2.5 billion seconds and every day, around the world, on average 150,000 people will discover the mystery of the great beyond.
In Taiwan, to avoid an ill attended funeral, which, locally, is a great embarrassment, family member have hosted great feasts, hired strippers and scantily clad ushers to ensure a vibrant and well attended send off.
In the US there are over 300 people cryogenically frozen awaiting the advancement of science to thaw them out and repair whatever ailment killed them in the first place.
The surgery and cosmetic industry is flourishing and it owes its fortunes to death itself; why; because ageing is an admission of the slow but relentless procession to eternities waiting room, a place we all appear to want to avoid.
Annually in the USA alone, those desperate to disguise natures way of saying “you’re dying, get over it!” spend over $6.5 billion being sliced, prodded and pumped in the vain attempt to give of the illusion of longevity. Every year, millions of desperate people use the surgeons knife or needle to say to the world; ‘I’m not dying, I remain young and vibrant, just look at me”. The illusion is often self gratifying but the fact remains; you’re dying and there is nothing anyone, anywhere can do about it.
So; what to do? Maybe we should all look at death from a different perspective, maybe death can be viewed as a celebratory departure from phase one of a great and mystical journey.
Heres the thing; science has the answers, it can tell us how we evolved, how we managed to turnout like we have done, anthropologists know why we survived the tens of millions of years sliding, crawling, climbing over this fragile rock spinning and moving through space at around 600km per second. In cosmic terms we are less than a pimple on an elephants arse, we are part of something no-one understands; so; how can we understand the reality of our transition from our evolved form to the next more eternal phase of this microscopic thing called existence. Death may just be the starting point and by that I don’t mean in a religious context or some other form of human created quackery; I mean it in a true sense of; does death release that etherial unknown we call our spirit.
We can only describe human spirit in terms we ourselves have created, words such as intellect, creativity, emotion, loves, exploration, hates, fears etc etc. but no one can explain what this thing is that buzzes around the heads of every living , breathing, human yet to die on this planet. And it doesn’t stop there, I won’t even venture into the world of animal spirituality.
So here we are on a journey that many believe ends in death but it may be that this part is just getting the car out of the garage; who knows what happens when deaths engine kicks into life.
rant 