I have decided to write a series of blogs about death…
Please hear me out. It may be stating the obvious, but death is the only absolutely certain thing that happens to every living organism. And yet, as a species we humans appear ill equipped to cope with it. The very idea is something we can tend to avoid at all costs, though each of us day by day inexorably moves closer to this last adventure.
Before those who love me decide to panic, let me assure you that for now I have no diagnosis heralding my imminent demise.
My plan is to attempt to spend the next year consciously living my life in the light of my inevitable death. Already I feel excited at the prospect of what I will learn. What I will get done that I would not have achieved without this change in focus; how my priorities and aspirations will alter; how relationships will develop. My hope and intention is that I will make friends with death, so that my current life may become richer and more real; that preconceptions and unhelpful belief systems will be blown out of the water.
I guess I will meet several challenges, but as yet I don’t know the source of these. Might it be when I visit the funeral directors? Or writing the Useful List for those left behind when I die? Perhaps when I confront the nature of faith? Or clear out the underwear drawer? (Already there is a sting in the tail – the thought that someone may judge my Marks & Spencers knickers, or discover my bra size… Honestly, who really cares?!)
I don’t know when my time will come to die, but I would like to become a little more prepared than I currently am, by setting my light in a forward direction and seeing just what is illuminated in the process. You are welcome to accompany me on this exploration – after all, you are going to die too…..
That’s a very creative approach, Sue 🙂
Hopkins in “The Wreck of the Deutschland”:
‘Some find me a sword; some
The flange and the rail; flame,
Fang, or flood’ goes Death on drum,
And storms bugle his fame.
But we dream we are rooted in earth — Dust!
Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,
Wave with the meadow, forget that there must
The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.
And from C Day Lewis – the beginning of a poem I didnt think in itself was especially good, but it asks a very important question:
“Suppose that we,tomorrow or the next day,
Came to an end – in storm the shafting broken,
Or a mistaken signal, the flange lifting
Would that be premature, a text for sorrow?
Say what endurance gives or death denies us.”
(I dont know what it is about poets that mean “flange” appears in both these poems!)
Thanks for this Godfrey! I had to look up the meaning of “flange”, but interesting that I have been thinking in railway metaphors. The idea of a poem is lurking, about junctions, derailments, dead ends, railway journeys – but as life progresses there at last is a straight piece of track, lit up by a spotlight, with clear sight of buffers at the end of the line. I have issue with Hopkins over his sour scythe… It’s the embracing of the idea of death that I’m exploring. Apart from birth (or conception, but I’m not interested in those semantics), death is the only other sure fixed point. I like certainty; everything else is up for philosophical debate.