In September I had to write a message to my grandpa knowing that it would likely be the last thing I ever say to him. I was grateful for the chance to communicate something. But how do you say goodbye in the face of such finality? How do you sum up a lifetime of love and memories? The words you choose seem to carry much more weight. The short time frame and heightened sense of importance force a consideration of so many different things.
I've been putting this writing off. It's difficult to process, to sift through emotion, to acknowledge pain and uncertainty and loss. The limit of death makes me feel such a wide variety of things. Today would have been my grandpas birthday, and so I've decided to work through some of the thoughts I've been avoiding, to consider what I've learned from his life and the profound experience of witnessing his final moments.
We are uniquely gifted and cursed with the knowledge that there is a limit prescribed to our time here on earth. That every day we are losing a bit of ourselves until at some point we no longer exist. It's something I've often thought and read about, but until you observe someone who means so much to you make the transition from life to death, it always seems abstract, like something in the far off future. One of the many things that struck me as I watched my grandpa die was the aloneness death requires. It is eventually a journey to be travelled by no one but yourself. When it comes time to die, to cease existing, no amount of tears, good deeds, praying or pleading will stop the flow of time. For all of our different experiences in life, there is a certain and common limit to our physical existence. I feel as if almost all we are driven to do, to become, to experience, is in recognition of this fact.
There is a well-known phrase, to "live each day as if it were your last." But do we really stop to consider the weight and importance of this instruction? To me, what this means is doing nothing without consideration of the whole. It's about how each action fits into the character you are creating. How your habits add up to a life. Truly understanding that we could breathe our final breath today, lose this incredible gift of consciousness, of energy, of life. Deeply considering the consequence of this expiration date that hangs over us.
I would be lying to you and to myself if I said I wasn't frightened. We are so fragile, so fallible. There is little comfort for this fear but the knowledge that each of us are equally limited and uncertain about our eventual fate. So much goes into our aliveness. There are so many working parts to our physical body. I am afraid for my physical body and its slow decay. But I am also fearful of failing to live a good life. Of living without a framework to hang my actions on, of wasting my youth and my health. I'm afraid of dying without expressing to people how deeply I love them, without resolving internal conflicts I have, without achieving something of importance. I feel an increased sense of urgency to my actions, I am much more aware of the value each minute of my time contains.
So what now? How do we choose to respond, to act, to adapt? What have I learned from this, how will I process challenge and difficulty like this in the future? How will I conduct and handle myself? So this is death, this is what dying looks like. The act of dying is eventually the same for all. To live is to also be dying. Really appreciate, savour and experience being alive! Pay attention. See things from perspectives other than your own. Smile radiantly, be authentic. You don't know how much somebody may need your joy, or what effect it may have.
Live with intensity. Love intensely. Speak with conviction, speak with confidence. Dedicate much of your time to learning how to govern your emotions and discipline yourself. Return to your breath. Concentrate on the breath in and out. Savour the richness and beauty of a simple breath. Feel gratitude for this moment, this specific breath. Give real and honest thanks to be alive in this moment.
In the face of death, there is little else that matters. Our daily concerns and worries.. it all vanishes. While contending with this subject, my favourite resource has been the Stoic writings of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. I've included all of the notes I have from their thoughts on death, in hopes you find as much value in it as I have!
Meditations- Marcus Aurelius
Vacating your mind from all its other thoughts, perform each action as if it were the last of your life.
Life for each of us is a mere moment, and yours is nearly over. Stop your wandering.
You may leave this life at any moment: have this possibility in your mind in all that you do, say, or think.
What is death? Nothing more than a function of nature.
No one can lose either the past or the future. How could anyone be deprived of what they do not possess?
Both the longest lived and earliest to die suffer the same loss. It's only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived.
In a mans life his time is a mere instant, his existence a flux. All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion.
At all times awaiting death, with the glad confidence that it is nothing more than the dissolution of the elements of which every living creature is composed.
Life is expended day by day and the remaining balance diminishes
Even if release must come here and now, he will depart as easily as he would perform any other act that admits of integrity and decency. Fate does not catch him with his life unfulfilled.
Remember, each of us only lives in the present moment, a mere fragment of time. The rest is life past or uncertain future.
Life is a small thing, and the small cranny of the earth in which we live it.
The universe is change, life is judgement. Death, just like birth, is a mystery of nature
You do not have thousands of years to live. Urgency is on you. While you live, while you can, become good.
You are a soul carrying a corpse.
Change: nothing inherently bad in the process, nothing inherently good in the result. There is a river of creating, and time is a violent stream.
You should not think there any difference between life to the upteenth year and life to tomorrow. Always look on human life as short and cheap. Yesterday sperm; tomorrow ashes. So one should pass through this tiny fragment of time in tune with nature, and leave it gladly.
Look behind you at the huge gulf of time, and another infinity ahead. In this perspective, what is the difference between an infant of 3 days and a 90 year old?
Existence is like a river in a ceaseless flow, its actions a constant succession of change.
Think of the whole of existence, of which you have the tiniest part; think of the whole of time, in which you have been assigned a brief and fleeting moment; think of destiny- what fraction of that are you?
How quickly time will cover everything- and how much is covered already!
Soon you will have forgotten all things: soon all things will have forgotten you.
All that you see will in a moment be changed by the nature which governs the whole: it will create other things out of this material and then again others out of that, so that the world is always young.
Imagine you were now dead, or had not lived before this moment. Now view the rest of your life as a bonus, and live it as nature directs.
Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.
Natures aim for everything includes its cessation just as much as its beginning and its duration- like someone throwing up a ball. How can it be good for the ball on the way up, and bad on the way down, or even when it hits the ground?
Life is short for both praiser and for praised, for the remembering and the remembered
He who fears death fears either unconsciousness or another sort of consciousness. Now if you will no longer be conscious you will not be conscious either of anything bad. If you are to take on a different consciousness, you will be a different being and life will not cease.
Do not despise death: welcome it, rather, as one further part of natures will.
Just as you may now be waiting for the child your wife carries to come out of the womb, so you should look forward to the time when your soul will slip this bodily sheath.
Turn now to the stages of your life- childhood, say, adolescence, prime, old age. Here too each change a death. Anything fearful there? Was there anything to fear? So too there is nothing to fear in the termination, the pause, and the change of your whole life. In a moment, the earth will cover us all.
How brief the gap from birth to dissolution, how vast the gulf of time before your birth, and an equal infinity after your dissolution.
Die in extreme old age or die before your time. It will all be the same.
Keep constantly in your mind an impression of the whole of time and the whole of existence- and the thought that each individual thing is, on the scale of existence, a mere fig-seed; on the scale of time, one turn of a drill
Consider each individual thing you do and ask yourself whether to lose it through death makes death itself any cause for fear.
If, then, when you finally come close to your exit, you have left all else behind and value only your directing mind and the divinity within you, if your fear is not that you will cease to live but that you never started on a life in accordance with nature, then you will be a man worthy of the universe that gave you birth.
In a short while you will be nobody and nowhere. It is the nature of things to change, to perish, be transformed, so that different things can come to be.
"But I have not played my 5 acts, only 3". True, but in life 3 acts can be the whole play. Completion is determined by that being who caused first your composition and now your dissolution. You have no part in either. Go then in peace; the God who lets you go is at peace with you.
Seneca ------
No amount of wisdom enables one to do away with mental or physical weaknesses that arise from natural causes.
Death ought to be right there before the eyes of a young man just as much as an old one.
Every day should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives.
If God adds the morrow, we should accept it joyfully. The man who looks for the morrow without worrying over it knows a peaceful independence and a happiness beyond all others.
It's only when you're breathing your last that the way you've spent your time will become apparent.
No count is taken of years. Just where death is expecting you is something we cannot know; so, for your part, expect him everywhere.
It is a very good thing to familiarize oneself with death. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.
There is but one chain holding us in fetters, and that is our love of life. Being prepared to do at once what we must do at some time or other.
Count your years and you'll be ashamed to be wanting and working for exactly the same things you wanted when you were a boy. Of this one thing make sure against your dying day- that your faults die before you do.
Even if you had a large part of your life remaining before you, you would have to organize it very economically to have enough for all the things that are necessary.
Isn't it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time is desperately short?
Death is just not being. What that is like, I know already.
We too are lit and put out. We suffer somewhat in the intervening period, but at either end of it there is a deep tranquility.
We are wrong in holding that death follows after, when it precedes as well as succeeds.
The man who you should admire and imitate is the one who finds it a joy to live and in spite of that is not reluctant to die. There is nothing the wise man does reluctantly.
Death: I would not have you grieve unduly over it. I can scarcely demand that you should not grieve at all- and yet I am convinced it is better that way.
When one has lost a friend, one's eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, but not lamentation.
In our tears we are trying to find means of proving that we feel the loss. We shall realize that we have lost all too much time while they are still alive.
I should prefer to see you abandoning grief than it abandoning you. Give it up as early as possible.
I bear it in mind not only that all things are liable to death but that liability is governed by no set rules. Whatever can happen at any time can happen today.
To the soul this body of ours is a burden and a torment. The wise man is inseparable from his body, and yet he is detached from it, directing his thoughts towards things far above. He neither loves life nor hates it.
Within this dwelling so liable to injury there lives a spirit that is free.
What is death? Either a transition or an end. I am not afraid of coming to an end, this being the same as never having begun, nor transition, for I shall never be in confinement quite so cramped anywhere else as I am here.
At whatever point you leave life, if you leave it in the right way, it is a whole.
Wouldn't you think a man a prize fool if he burst into tears because he didn't live a thousand years ago? A man is as much a fool for shedding tears because he isn't going to be alive a thousand years from now. You didn't exist and you won't exist. You've no concern with either period.
You weren't thinking, surely, that you wouldn't yourself one day arrive at the destination towards which you have been heading from the beginning? Every journey has its end.
You want to live- but do you know how to live? Is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead?
It seemed to me that in death I would not be passing away but passing on my spirit to my friends.
In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes.
There are people who do not learn what they need simply because they spend their time learning things they will never need. Measure your life- it just does not have room for so much!
In the ashes, all men are levelled.
The good man should go on living as long as he ought to, not just as long as he likes.
Every day, every hour, sees a change in you. While other people are snatched away from us, we are being filched away surreptitiously from ourselves.
The best parts of life are flitting by, the worse are yet to come. The wine which is poured out first is the purest wine in the bottle, the heavies particles settle to the bottom. The best comes first. Are we going to let others drain it so as to keep the dregs for ourselves?
As it is with a play, so it is with life- what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. Make sure that you round it off with a good ending.