On Death (or, Your Happy Thought For The Day)

You are going to die.

St. Francis praised God for our Sister Death; yet Jesus Himself wept when He saw it. John Donne called Death a hateful slave, doomed to its own final death; yet the skull-tree of Golgotha became the great standing key to the Everlasting Mansions. Our dance with the scythe is ambivalent—cryptic, you might well say—but one of life's few bedrocks certitudes is that we'll dance that dance.

Ellie and I are preparing for a birth. Three more months. The kid will emerge from the safest, warmest place she'll ever know into a world of goblins, and then she'll live out her life and die. God willing, she'll bury the both of us first, and have kids of her own who will bury her and die. I know this all sounds horrifically morbid, but let's just look straight at it. Things are rough down here.

It's funny (ha) that we generally don't recall learning about death. There's a whole bit about that in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: "There must have been a moment in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering—stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it. . . . We must be born with an intuition of mortality." I remember my first dead pet, Socks the gerbil; I remember my first dead relative, my God-father Bill, for whom I bore pall at the insufficient age of six. Requiescat in pace. But in neither case was I puzzled when told that they wouldn't be waking up. My awareness of the grave predates my memory of the alphabet or the praxis of tying my shoes.

Now, that might sound like some heavy shit for a little kid to be carrying around. But the truth is, as far back as I can recall, I've never been afraid of death. I assume it's because, praise God, I was taught from infancy to praise God. I've always known there's a better place I can get to when I die. (Note, can get to: not necessarily will. Gotta pick the right paths through the proving ground.) And it's not just that in Heaven you can have all the ice cream you want. It's that all the suffering, all the doubt and fear and misery and anguish and despair, will make sense there, will be explained and show their meaning and bear their fruit. Once there, we'll be able to look back and see that seventy years of wandering and toil were really all one great charge of wild horses and blazing swords. The last hacking breath of cancered lungs, the pain in the chest and the moment of dread, the asphalt hurtling up to meet us—whatever death we get, after we make it through, will reveal itself as the final battle in a long, long war. And then the revelry begins.