Loving Life, Loving Death
Love gives meaning to both.
When I was five, a strange puzzle dawned on me:
“All people die… and I’m a person… so… uh…”
I remember that day vividly. I walked down the street to play with a friend two years younger than me. While we piled rocks in his garden, I looked up at him and said “Do you realize you’re going to die someday?”
His mother overheard, looked at me and kindly but firmly said “Don’t tell him that.”
I always found that strange.
I came home, still stewing on this, feeling like something really didn’t make sense about this logic. But it really seems relentless!
I walked up to the kitchen where my parents poured over paperwork on the dining table. My eyes barely reached over the countertop. I hooked my fingers on the wall and leaned over the metal line between the carpet and the kitchen linoleum and asked:
“Hey Mom… am I going to die someday?”
Mom turned and looked at me, first with alarm flashing across her eyes, and then kindness. She walked up to me, kneeled down, gently squeezed my shoulders, and said:
“Oh, no sweetie! People think everyone dies because everyone gets old. We’ll get rid of aging before you get old. And even if we’re wrong, if you die before then, we’ll just bring you back, because we love you.”
It turned out that paperwork on the table was for cryonics. I was too young to really understand, but I understood enough to know that my parents believed in it, and I trusted them.
Even if one of us should die, it wouldn’t be forever.
That was enough for my five-year-old self. That lifted the confusion. I brightened right up and bounced along.
Throughout my childhood thereafter, the family motto was “The first hundred years is always the hardest.” We meant it playfully, but not as a joke.
I grew up anticipating the pleasures and adventures of millennia stretching before me.
And I watched my friends reject cryonics, and even the general idea of living forever. Their reasons never made sense to me. My parents warned me about this, describing it as the psychosis of mortality, naming it “deathism”.
My father said that centuries from now we would look back at this time as “the age of suicide”: a time when all the pieces for life and love lie before us, but mortal madness cloaked in “wisdom” still caused an unnecessary tidal wave of blood and grief.
We would stand on colonies of the Moon, looking up at our precious cradle the Earth, and reminisce. “Do you remember, at the dawn of the 21st Century, when we nearly didn’t make it?”
And we would recite the names.
Our friends, our loved ones, the absolute gems of souls who had graced our lives and whose stories might have reached the stars and the centuries…
…but instead are ash and dust.
They are instead our whispered memories.
Our song of mourning.
I spent a long time in grief. I got to know grief well. Each friend who chose death over life was someone I would outlive, and someday these moments I cherish with them would exist only as memories I carry. They would no longer be there to help me carry them.
So it was up to me to grieve my friends, and to remember them.
In my teens my friends called me “Val”. It was a reference to Valentine Michael Smith, the main character from Robert Heinlein’s book “Stranger in a Strange Land”. Valentine was a human raised on Mars, with tremendous Martian wisdom and keen human intelligence, but because he grew up outside of all human culture he had no idea how to navigate it.
They thought this fit me absurdly well.
So yes.
I am a stranger in a strange land.
I’m finally learning how to navigate this strange mortal culture…
…but I grew up immortal.
And because of this, I’d like to offer a few foreign whispers, if you’d care to listen.
I just finished watching “Before I Fall”.
It’s a beautiful film — basically the teenage girl version of “Groundhog’s Day”. It merges love and death with a beautiful grace and depth. And I personally think it’s waaay better than Bill Murray’s version!
Near the end, the heroine learns how to love the moment. She treasures the raindrops hanging off the leaves of the evergreen trees in the freezing morning air. She holds her little sister with boundless care.
(I don’t think I’m spoiling anything. It’s predictable. The beauty of the film lives in its emotional artistry, not its surprises.)
She reaches this clarity of heart by meeting Death, understanding Death, and choosing not to flinch.
This is the language of grace.
Radiantly true, pure, good.
I want to emphasize that I love grace. I actually love what Death offers you. I never, ever want to threaten that. It’s the treasure of Heaven, the soul’s song.
Please remember that in what follows.
Because mortal hearts carry a burden.
I’m going to point at that burden.
And normally when I do so, mortals cringe and dismiss, thinking I’m callous to the sacred.
I promise, I love it too.
Death is a teacher. We need Death’s lesson for now.
But Death is not the lesson.
There is only ever one lesson:
Love.
The heroine in the film learns to love. She had tossed aside her little sister’s paper crane gift at the very start of the film because she was too numb to feel her sibling’s preciousness. She didn’t see the raindrops before the end because her thoughts wrapped her in a Hell of obsession with her recurring day.
When she saw Death clearly, it opened her. Kindly. Vividly. Vulnerable, raw, beautiful.
But what Death showed her was how and why to love.
Most five-year-olds don’t know how to handle the prospect of their deaths, or that of their caretakers. Most of the adults around them don’t know either. The lesson usually is “Don’t talk about it. Don’t look. Just focus on anything else.”
(Recall the mother of my young friend: “Don’t tell him that.”)
Love both is and requires vividly feeling truth with your heart.
If you believe, in the way five-year-old you could come to believe, that the truth is terrifying in a way that makes even the grown-ups around you nervous…
…you just might try to numb yourself.
You might turn to fantasies, and false love, and sensation, just to distract yourself.
When Death pins you down, and tenderly but firmly holds your face, and guides your eyes into the abyss of its dark eyes…
…you let go.
You can feel again.
And Death will come for you if you stay numb too long. It comes as depression, and as cancer, and as a weak heart, and as boredom, and as the loss of those you loved.
Death is the final grace. It guarantees that you cannot keep your love bounded forever.
But the point isn’t Death.
The point is love.
I’ve done a particular heart-softening death meditation practice quite a lot. It looks something like this:
“The person I’m interacting with might well die later today. They could die any minute. Or we might not interact for a long time, and one day I’ll hear they’ve died. So this might be the last time I see them / text them / talk to them. In light of this, how do I feel about this moment? Is this how I want to leave things between us?”
Every moment is precious, and alive.
I often go on walks. I live with my parents, so I make a point of hugging both of them before I go, letting them know and feel that I love them.
Knowing I might come back to find Dad had a stroke, or Mom had a heart attack, sharpens that into emotional clarity.
When we’re at lunch, sometimes Dad gets uptight about some political thing or spiritual idea. (He’s pretty pissed at God for creating suffering.) I can argue with him, and seek to be understood… but how much does that really matter? What serves love?
Contemplating Death offers some glimmers of clarity here.
And, if either of my parents were dying and I could heal them, I absolutely would.
Mortal culture actually agrees with this, but I see so, so much confusion here. Like with the strange rehearsed wisdom:
“Death brings meaning to life!”
No. No, it really doesn’t. Love brings meaning to life. Death tears open calcified hearts, sometimes salvaging their ability to love. It’s just that mortal culture has no other tools for revitalizing certain traumatized chambers of the heart, so it looks as though Death is the only source of this meaning.
We demonstrate this every time we leap to passionate action when something threatens our loved ones’ lives. We dig for the epipen, or call 911, or spend hours or days or years researching alternative health approaches when mainstream medicine fails us.
We don’t just accept death. We don’t just let our loved ones die, calling it “wisdom”. Accepting death was never the goal. It’s a path to love.
I claim, from my strange vantage point, that we would not need Death’s teaching methods if we willingly and actively sought its lessons out.
How fully can you choose to love, right here, right now?
Can you love this moment?
Can you love every being you touch?
No?
Neither can I.
But I think we can learn to do so.
I think it’s the only lesson that’s really worth learning.
And we don’t have to wait until we’re forced to.
Death is a lot more horrifying than most people pretend.
Yes, there’s something sacred and beautiful about it too. It reminds us of our spiritual home. There’s magic that happens at the moment of death.
But.
Mortals jump to that part so, so quickly.
When you’re working on learning from Death by accepting it, the goal isn’t to find what’s pretty about it. That almost completely misses the point.
The point is this:
You’re incarnated.
Your flesh will rot off your bones — starting while you can still feel it.
Your mind will decay.
You will watch loved ones rot too. You will bury people you love. You will watch dear friends develop sores and lumps and lose eyesight and hearing and sanity. You will probably listen to someone you love groaning or even screaming in pain in their last days on Earth, and there won’t be a damned thing you can do about it.
If you have children, you will probably notice age breaking their bodies down before you enter the grave yourself.
You know this.
We all do.
But we don’t really talk about it.
Instead we create these absurd illusions of “aging gracefully” while not actually making any serious plans for how to do so. We shove our elderly out of sight (at least in the United States). We ramble about how the finiteness of life is somehow a precious gift, but we don’t talk honestly about how utterly fucking horrible it is to know that every single person every one of us knows and loves is going to experience tremendous pain and dysfunction and then die.
And if someone starts really goddamned grieving about this? If someone starts honestly displaying the soul-wrenching pain of truly digesting this hundreds of millennia long trauma in our species?
“Oh, but Death is our greatest teacher! Death brings meaning to life!”
Try telling that to someone who just lost their beloved spouse. Or their child.
There’s a carnal, passionate, deep soul-level truth here that mortal culture keeps skipping past.
Death is a powerful teacher because it’s horrible.
Yes, of course, there’s bliss and light and kindness. Yes, of course, horror is a spiritual misperception.
And.
People still experience the misperception.
You can’t have compassion for a form of suffering you refuse to look at and try to gaslight yourself and others into thinking isn’t there or doesn’t matter.
This fucking hurts.
Please, for the love of kindness and beauty and all things wonderful and sacred…
…please, actually look in the darkness.
We don’t have to suffer this way.
There’s a way out.
A wise way out.
But we have to look first.
We need to stop pretending that we’re fine with this.
Even if we somehow should be…
…we’re not.
And that really, really matters.
Sometimes when I bring up my immortal background, someone will ask me:
“How could you stand outliving everyone you know again and again, forever?”
It used to occur to me as very strange, similar to “But won’t you get bored?” (I mean, what if I get bored now? I don’t think the answer is to kill myself!)
But I think I understand the spirit of the question better now. And that makes it feel important to answer.
It’s an honor to learn to love so many people. To remember them. To be able to hold the preciousness of their being while standing on the Moon looking up at the cosmic cradle and singing their stories.
I would learn to grieve well. I would get good at grieving.
And every single one of them would transform me.
Because that’s what love is.
Reality is always fresh. You can’t get bored with it. You can only become numb, and pretend you understand.
Every soul you meet offers a way to crack you open a little wider.
If I can stay awake to this beauty here and now, treasuring the raindrops on the trees and the chill in the air and this precious moment with another person that will never happen again…
…then there is no reason to die.
Even if that moment includes heart-wrenching sorrow.
Even if it leads to sorrow.
Again and again.
Saying “Yes, I love you, unconditionally” to all of reality means that reality never has to break through my resistance to hold me.
I hope, and suspect, that someday we will fully integrate Death as a species. We will choose when we die, consciously, collaboratively with the flow of all that is. It will never be forced anymore — because we will no longer need that force to break open our hearts.
As a species, we will earn our collective immortality through wisdom.
We do it by really, truly loving life.
We do it by really, truly loving death.
We do it…
…by loving.