one who lives with a firm understanding of death is one who lives with a better relationship with fear. i think one who has a deep sense of the inevitability of death is one more likely to be free from fear. what is there to fear when we all die anyway?
one who has accepted death is one more likely to truly live. to know death is to know life.
sometimes i feel like i’ve been too sheltered from death. sometimes i feel like a relationship with death is to develop a better sense of what’s truly important. death, the shedding of illusion. death, the drawing of the curtain. death, freedom.
currently reading the handmaid’s tale. a novel of an oppressive regime that condemns so much of the human psyche to the shadows. living itself becomes narrower and narrower until all enter the confines of what is the acceptable path to walk, room enough for two to trudge shoulder to shoulder, none more.
the word taboo loses its meaning. how can it retain any definition when existing becomes like an iceberg? 1% exposed to the light, above the water, the other 99% submerged into the depths. that is the taboo.
i dislike how death has become something resembling a taboo. i dislike our discomfort with death. i dislike our discomfort with aging. i dislike our attempts to hide from its realities. i dislike our desire to forget the fact that we do eventually die. when that awareness hits us, the fact that we and all of our loved ones will one day perish, we seek a distraction from the jolt of fear that hits our systems. but what is that jolt but the electric current that is awakening to a higher purpose? why cannot that jolt be channeled into purpose? why cannot that electricity be used to create a meaningful life, why do we run from that feeling that is the beginning of something beautiful that tells us what is truly important if we would just let it?
why do we hide signs of aging? ugh, the silliness. the silliness. the distaste i feel seeing older men and women doing everything they can to portray false signs of youth. I find it embarrassing, I feel secondhand embarrassment for them. why hide? why hide from reality? it seems childish to me. they hide from the wisdom of aging, donning false masks to claim a sense of worth. enough.
i think this is one of the many ways in which death has become a taboo. we not only hide from the reality of mortality, we hide any visible sign that we are approaching death’s gateway. the closer one is to that gateway, the less relevant they feel, the less relevant they may be regarded. how completely and utterly foolish.
be. real. give me realness or give me death. give me realness and death both. maybe they’re more similar than we’d otherwise think. perhaps there’s more wisdom to the adage “in death, all answers are revealed” than otherwise thought.
THE CLOSET MYSTIC 