I'm starting to feel differently about death

I have always been fascinated by death, and I doubt that will ever change. I have also always been terrified of death, although that bit seems to be changing. And yet, I've always understood suicide--the need/desire to end it all, to just be free of consciousness forever. 

The actual physicality of dying and decay is intriguing. 

This past summer I read Mary Roach's book Stiff, and I couldn't read it fast enough. I didn't know this place existed until I read this book. I regularly tell G that he should be a forensic doctor because he loves to poke at dead things or cut into preserved corpses (of worms, fish, etc). N has an interest in forensics, too. M gets "sicky" easily, so he will be the one who opts out of anything remotely related to blood and bone.

I have been reading the kids the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman for the past several months. I read this series probably 20 years ago before I had children, so I had forgotten a TON. 

The other night, though, we got to the point in The Amber Spyglass, where Lyra meets her Death, and I loved the idea that from the moment a person is born, their death essentially hangs with them through every experience, ready when the time comes to take their hand and gently escort them into the great beyond. Essentially, the death functions similarly to the soul. In this book, both are personified. 

I don't know what I believe about death...what happens after, although my biggest sense is nothing. You simply don't exist anymore. Just as my consciousness of life didn't happen at the moment of my birth, and I remember nothing of the "before" or my birth or the several years after my birth, I think death will be the same. 

A while back I listened to an audiobook by Barbara Ehrenreich titled Natural Causes, and there was a part that struck me:

"You can think of death as a tragic interruption of your life... or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and see it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us."

I think it is pretty normal to feel scared of death when you're young, but the older I get, the more I understand that death can begin to feel like a relief. This doesn't mean you don't want to live anymore, but it means that due to the physical burdens of living (fatigue, disease, aging bones and muscles, etc.), you are tired. There is a point when many people if they live long enough are simply exhausted. They don't actively wish to die but they are okay with the prospect of eternal "sleep" and rest. 

And yet, I also understand the desire to not exist anymore as a young person due to the confusion and the angst and the general unmoored feelings that a person can have when they are still raging at figuring things out or if depression has taken hold of them. 

Several years ago I spoke to a mom whose son was having suicidal thoughts, and she had never had those herself. She couldn't wrap her head around the idea, and so I explained to her that I had sort of always had suicidal thoughts. It was as strange to me to imagine a person never having such thoughts as it was to her to imagine someone having them at all. 

My dad's diagnosis with face/neck cancer this summer and his current chemotherapy (which is preventative since his cancer has not metastasized) has me tuned into mortality. For this to coincide with a pandemic that has taken over 200,000 lives makes it even scarier. 

I don't like to think of my parents dying, and yet being forced to reckon with it provides a silver lining. Last year when Dad had his open-heart surgery to repair a valve and was still in the hospital, I helped him out of bed one day and bathed his back while my mom went home to shower. I am not a sentimental person, but this was a profoundly important experience for me (and why are my eyes getting bleary right now.) 

Sorry. Needed a tissue. 

Helping my dad in that moment was one of the most meaningful experiences in my life, right up there with marrying and having children. Seeing my dad vulnerable was a gift. 

Damn. More tissues. 

Seeing my dad vulnerable then was a gift. Seeing my dad vulnerable now during his cancer is a gift.

It is not a gift I expected or want at all. AT ALL.

But to see it only as a burden and sadness misses a large part of the picture of what it means to be human and have a meaningful life.