My earliest
experience involving death wasn't my first memory of it. I was two years old
and my grandpa died. I can't remember that, and I don't remember him being
around at all. I know he was a loving grandfather and cared a lot about his
family, because everyone tells me the stories, but I don't remember him myself.
What I know of him is only what I have been told. That he was kind, honest, and
had a heavy Swedish accent. That he worked at the mill downtown, and went to
lunch every day at the Spar where he hit on my grandma, his favorite waitress,
until she finally fell for him. Because I didn't remember his death for the
fact that I was too young, I didn't really understand what death meant until
much later on in my life.
My second
experience was when my childhood best friend's mom, Treava, died. That woman
was extraordinary. She was like another mother to me, always affectionate to
everyone. She was an amazing mother to her own children, and acted as one to
all of the neighboring children. She died when I was eight years old. I
remember being at home and my best friend, Katie, knocking on my door and she
was in tears. My mother and I let her in and asked what was wrong and she told
us between sobs. My mother and little sister tried to comfort her. I, however,
just sat with them and did my best to understand why she was crying without
asking because I didn't want to offend anyone in such an awkward and emotional
time. Even then, I didn't understand death and what it means. I remember her
funeral, the first funeral I've been to that I can make a real memory of, still
unable to comprehend why everyone was so upset. It wasn't until a few months
later when I went over to her house and finally realized that I was never going
to see Treava again and I wondered why she had left us. But I didn’t consider
her as “dead” so much as I thought she was just “gone.” To a child, those are
two different and very conflicting things to comprehend.
When I was 18, a
friend of mine, Jypsy, was killed in a car crash. I was walking down the street
downtown and a couple of my friends ran up to me telling me they had something
important to tell me. "Jypsy's dead." I didn't believe them. Why
would I? My friends aren't supposed to die. "Jypsy's dead. She died in a
car crash." I nodded and they told me what they knew, that her fiancé had
been drinking and driving and the car flipped over, and they asked me to go up
to Community Youth Services (CYS) to find out more. I still didn’t believe it
until I arrived at CYS, when I walked in to find all of my friends crying. For
the rest of that day and a long time afterwards, I dwelled on the ideas of life
and death and what I am supposed to do to cope with it. I didn’t understand it
as a child, and I still wasn’t anywhere near ready to realize it as a young
adult.
And then it hit
me hard in 2011. Five people in my life passed. One was shot in the head and
murdered when his home was burglarized. Another died in an abandoned warehouse
fire when someone left a candle burning. The girl that first taught me how to
play violin killed herself by exploding her apartment via gas. My grandmother
died of Alzheimer’s. And finally, one of my closest friends relapsed and died
from a drug overdose, and that was the one that made me realize so much more
than I wanted. All of this happened in less than a year, and it became
increasingly tiresome to accept and deal with. “All of my friends are dying,” I
kept thinking. In the end, you can either let it drive you insane or you can
analyze it and accept it with the best logical sense you can summon despite all
the emotional stress. Death isn’t going to stop happening just because you
can’t handle it.
Let's lay down
the basic facts: With every birth comes the guarantee of death to follow later
on. It is inevitable, you can't avoid it, and it will happen to everyone.
Whether you like it or not, you and everyone you know is going to die. You
cannot prevent it, you cannot stop it, and you have to accept it and move on
when it happens.
Death, as
defined, is the act of dying; the end of life; the total and permanent
cessation of all the vital functions of an organism. It is the termination of a
life form’s existence.
As death occurs
in our lives, we are reminded that our bodies are mortal. However, we are also
reminded to cherish life, the gifts that we are given, and all of our blessings
while we can and while we are alive.
Nothing, except
your spirit, will endure eternity. And that isn’t even completely proven. There
is as much evidence proving the existence of a spirit after a body’s death as
there is otherwise. Maybe we humans get the shit end of the stick and even our
“spirit” disappears with our rotting corpse. I like avoiding that train of
thought, though. It’s a bit depressing.
While I am
trying my hardest not to sound like some sort of hippie that has had way too
much free time in the woods with hallucinogenic fungus, I’d like to say that
though we are physically mortal and our bodies will eventually expire, it is
still possible to be immortal, in a sense. To be immortal means to live
forever, right? I am in consensus that it means eternal life, though I believe
it’s spiritually. I am not talking about an afterlife or reincarnation, and at
this point in my life, I don’t acknowledge a god or a heaven or a hell, either.
That is an entirely different matter that should be reserved for another time.
People think of
immortality in different ways. To some, it means eternal life both physically
and spiritually. That, I suspect, is the most common belief.
Another idea of
immortality is eternal youth, but still the capability of death. An example of
this is in the Amazon culture in the comic books of Wonder Woman. I know, I
probably should use a better example, but I read comics, and it's only natural
for me to use it as a reference and example. In Wonder Woman, the all-female
race of Amazons is granted with the gift of immortality by the gods of Mount
Olympus. However, in the battles that have occurred in Themysciran history, many
Amazons have been killed, including Queen Hyppolita, Donna Troy, Artemis, and
even Diana (aka the current and everlasting Wonder Woman, though Hyppolita and
Artemis were both Wonder Woman for a time) have all died. These Amazons are
immortal in the way that they will be eternally young and will never grow old,
but they can still be killed just as any other human can be.
In my opinion,
though, immortality is a mental stand or condition. It is achieved during your
life and granted after death, much like a mental version of the Fountain of
Youth.
Let's look at
the Fountain of Youth for a moment. A mythical spring promising eternal youth
to those who drink from it. Stories of this legendary fountain have been around
since before the European's first arrival to the Caribbean. However, the most
well known tales revolve around Juan Ponce de León's quest to find it in
Florida in 1513. He heard of the story from some Natives in Puerto Rico after
conquering it, discovering loads of gold along the way, and although his
journey led to the European discovery of Florida, the Natives he encountered
eventually shot him with a poison tipped arrow and killed him. He never found
any fountain, let alone any future life.
No one has found
a real spring that produces youth granting water. It does not exist. But what
if the Fountain of Youth is a metaphor for a sense of cultivation that Ponce de
León didn't understand? Maybe to find the Fountain of Youth means to reach
spiritual and psychological self-enlightenment. It is something one searches
for themselves internally. It continues bubbling fourth because it comes from within.
That could be the ultimate idea of immortality.
That being said,
to become immortal means to set oneself at ease in spirit. Immortality is a
state of mind in which what is physical doesn't mean everything but what you
can remember being. Those memories live on in stories, myths, folklore and
legacies between people everywhere in this world. Death to us means to cease to
exist but when in fact it doesn't necessarily mean that. If people close to us
remember us then we never die at all. Same goes if we have children, because
they carry on parts of us in spirit, blood, and most of all, personality.
Therefore, if we are remembered, we can continue to live. We will still be very
much alive in the hearts and minds of those who knew us. Thus, we reach the
state of immortality. Just as how I remember Treava putting a bandage on my
shoulder when I fell out of a tree in her yard, and how I remember my friend
teaching me how to play the Israeli national anthem on violin on Decatur Street
in New Orleans.
No comments:
Post a Comment