gemini://rawtext.club:1965/~mieum/relog/2020-09-17-acdw-reply_to

I can only imagine how disorienting (or reorienting?) it must have been to lose so many loved ones in succesion like that, especially being unexpected. It's weirdly humanizing to encounter death. Like you said, it reminds you that you're never too old to be your mother's child. I like to talk about death for this reason. Death is honest and candid and wise. We have a lot to learn from those experiences, I think, but death is a "bad" thing we avoid. We would prefer to continue living, being the living organisms that we are, but death is the unavoidable reality backgrounding everything we do. We attempt to evade those harsh truths, and fantasize about being able to keep everything: our identities, our relationships, our memories. And when a loved one dies, we console each other with empty statements like "they are in a better palce now," or "grandma and grandpa are together again at last." Those may not be "empty" to someone who believes in an afterlife, reincarnation, or a substantial soul. But they *are* as empty as the void they attempt to fill or pave over: the profound inaccessibility of death and whatever it claims.

About a year and a half after my grandmother died, my dad passed away. They were very close, and losing his mother set of a chain of events that worsened his already unwell condition. I was able to be with him when he passed, and it was life-changing. The experience was similar to watching my daugher be born. Suddenly everything "made sense." Not that I understood everything, but the gravity of the experience made everything make sense---it became an overwhelmingly vivid context to everything I had ever thought and felt, and everything I would think and feel. The complexity of all those emotions is hard to pin down, and that's what makes talking about death so interesting. Those experiences are so raw that they become a seemingly infinite source of meaning. When they come in contact with other thoughts and feelings, you gain a slight shift in perspective---a point of view that didn't exist before death disclosed it in tangent.

The inaccessibility of death facinates me. I think it is beautiful that things end, that we all have points of termination, and that there is no ultimate control in nature. A person dies, and they are gone. That is scary. But life becomes miraculous in that context. We take it for granted that we are alive. That's all we've ever known, and we feel entitled to it. Losing it is the last thing anyone wants, so it's hard to appreciate how death could *mean* anything for life. The thing I've discovered is that abstract discourse *about* life and death are superficial in comparison. When you are embracing a dying person, debate and discussion do not exist. You are so immersed in that immediate experience that language and symbols are like rain drops falling on the surface of a vast sea. Everything exists as an extension of that way that moment feels, and after it is completed, and you go back out into the world, you find that everything is a path back to that raw, candid state.

People feel uneasy when you talk about how everything is out of control, that the universe is uncertain and lawless. Everything about life seems to say that is not the case---that order is basic, and chaos and destruction are somehow against us. But the reality is that nature includes all of this. Everything is natural by virtue of its existing _of_ nature. And here's the real juicy part: existence is not a spectator sport. The fact that there is no ultimate meaning to life means that life can be meaningful in the first place. The existentialist trope of despair only makes sense if you expect the world to have an original meaning you can rely on, something that _makes_ life meaningful, a kind of power you might get to wield or witness one day. But the absence of this does not mean we are freefalling into an abyss. If there is no ground---nothing to say which way is up---then we are really just floating. In that context, being dissatisfied with floating because it's not "flying" (defying gravity) is an ingratitude for life itself; a rejection of nature and a denial of time.

Our fear of death, our idea of it as anti-life is rooted in that expectation of something ultimate in the universe (and the chance for eternity). We feel like death is unfair, and because things do have meaning for us, we expect that there must be a _reason_ why they are capable of being meaningful, or that meaning must be pointing to something beyond itself. But maybe things are meaningful just because they are they way they are. Does the promise of more-after-this really make what we have more valuable? Does life require an afterlife to be worthwhile?

Life with my dad means what it does just because it was that life. That is all we have, and that is all we need. When we realize that, we can do beautiful things. And maybe we would want less if we did.

Re: reply to "Passage"