Thinking of Death on a Sunny Day

I always thought that life would make sense one day. With time I was sure I’d come to see what it all meant, what I learned, and what words of wisdom I could impart to others to make easier their paths as though I were an early explorer of this thing called life, bushwhacking through time. I waited for the big aha moment.

It never came.

I have some intense memories. Some come to me like tiny stories with precise beginnings, middles and ends, but without obvious meaning. These are like Aesop’s fables with no neatly summarized mottos. The tortoise and the hare? They never met. Or the hare won the race and that was that.

But I knew from my deep grasp of the biology of the brain, which is to say when I Googled it, that a lot of effort went into creating those memories. Thousands of neurons fired up so that I would remember specific incidents, recall how things looked at a particular moment, hark back to those smells and sounds. I was keenly aware how my body could be triggered, seemingly randomly, to relive a distant fear, feel a past wonder, re-experience the split wide open instance when everything in the world seemed to dissolve and there was simply the ephemeral brilliance of being.

My brain seemed to be an old shoe box in which vintage snapshots were randomly tossed. I’d occasionally pull one out, look it over, then toss it back in the mix without understanding exactly why I had bothered to store in my memory that particular incident. Maybe someday I’d put them all in a scrapbook and a narrative arc would emerge.

Well, I’m running out of time. This body I inhabit is terminal. To be clear, I am terminal in the way all sentient beings are terminal. We weren’t designed to last forever. Like the jar of jam in the back of my refrigerator, we all have an expiration date. Unlike the jam jar, our expiration dates cannot be ignored. We can’t take a sniff, determine it safe to eat, and be fine. The contents in life are inevitably deadly.

Death could strike out of nowhere like lightning. Or it might drag on for another three decades until I feel so feeble that I will have no choice but to go gentle into the night, Dylan Thomas be damned. Either way, I know the end is more nigh than it once was.

Despite that, I continue to act as if I have all the time in the world to dick around. It is a terrible habit that I occasionally vow to break. And always fail.

A few years ago, a friend of mine learned his father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The old man hadn’t been around much when his son was young. And they both knew that very soon he would be around at all. My friend traveled to be by his father’s side. He imagined with the “deadline” looming between them, their conversations would be intense and meaningful. He pictured one of those Victorian novel deaths, or maybe a Hollywood version of a Victorian novel death, where the dying person, previously cold and distant, becomes then kind and thoughtful enough to scrutinize the life he lived, celebrate the good moments, apologize for any hurts he caused, and love prevails triumphant.

That’s not what happened.

Instead, they talked about mundane stuff. Their conversations never went deeper than a surface scratch that could be buffed out. And when they ran out of stuff to say, which was often, the father pulled out a deck of playing cards and dealt himself countless games of solitaire. The image of the older man setting down a king followed by a queen followed by a jack and so on hour after hour in silence makes me overwhelmingly sad.

But not enough to delete those damned apps from my phone.

If you have life all figured out, good for you. A part of me, my better angels part, is happy that you have found the peace and serenity we all seek. But another part of me believes you only think you have it figured out and will in your future discover something that will throw it all off kilter once again. I won’t take pleasure in your misfortune, that ugly emotion the Germans named freudenschade but which exists unchristened in all cultures, but I will recognize it. I will nod my head knowing that you, like me, must contend with the ambivalence of reality. Trying to grasp it is like grabbing hold of smoke.

I fully expect to go to my grave as ignorant of life — and as in awe of it — as I was at the start.

But I'll know that an ace card can play high or low.