12:00pm | Although death has yet to be a big part of my life experience (I have yet to lose anyone with whom I feel a closeness), even as a child it was never far from my thoughts. It’s just like that for some of us—who knows why. Under the most mundane of circumstances probably a day doesn’t go by without my somehow thinking about it. And so when death actually hits close to home, forget about it.
A neighborhood woman was just murdered, and a dear friend’s father just died, and a local business owner passed at all of 33 years old, and so I’m thinking about death even more than usual. Once upon a time that meant unpragmatically focusing on the direct implications of topic itself: loss, pain, suffering, fear, cessation, nonexistence, blah. So let’s go there first.
As far back as I can remember concerning my awareness of death, one thing was woefully clear: Either I’ll go first, or I’ll lose someone. (I didn’t put a lot of faith in the happy thought that we might all go together simultaneously.) That this is “the natural way of things” gave me absolutely no succor (it still doesn’t). All that mattered to me was the inevitable loss.
To be sure, loss is inevitable. In this life you lose everything, first item by item (time, persons, what have you), then everything that’s left in one fell privation of self. You can’t take it with you, any of it.
You do, of course, have the interim, that ever-vanishing stretch of time between now and the next loss, the coming losses, the losing of it all. If you’re one sort of person, in that space you kind of ignore what’s coming. There’s only so much you can do, after all. Your worries and your cafard won’t change anything, so why give it any thought? You live your life as fully as you can without respect to death, and when that fell sergeant comes, he comes.
But if you’re a different sort of person, this strategy is untenable, or at least incomplete. Not all of us are good at ignoring the elephant in the room, the elephant that will finally crush the life out of you and everybody you love. You may be put in mind of what Paul Bowles writes in The Sheltering Sky:
Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
This passage may resonate with you precisely because life has never seemed limitless at all; rather, that endings are always crushingly close. But what to do in the face of that?
Most of the terrible eventualities we can imagine (being abducted in the night and tortured, finding out that none of your loved ones ever really cared) will not and were never going to happen; but one that easily might is looking back on your life with regret. Seeing yourself on your deathbed reciting to yourself a litany of “If I had only . . .” is a dreadful vision on three counts: because at that point you will be powerless to redress any of it, because you will be aware that it didn’t have to be this way, and because there must be something you can do now to avoid finding yourself in that lamentable future state.
But how to plot the course from here to not-there is not so obvious if you ask yourself what concrete (as opposed to abstract) steps you can take right now to move yourself farther on down the road in the right direction—not so obvious because it’s often tricky to choose the right specific actions without reference to their contexts. It’s easy, for example, to say that, because family matters, it’s going to matter on your deathbed whether you married and had children, but on the whole it’s quite a bit harder to determine what to do to meet the right person, if the person you’ve met really is “the one,” if having a child now or later or at all is going to be the best decision for all concerned, etc. Part of the difficulty comes from the sometimes wildly unpredictable effects of each decision, never mind strategy (a complex of decisions). Maybe if you have a child at Time X you all get a happy life, whereas if you have one at Time Y things turn out disastrously. That “[t]here are no guarantees in life” is beside the point.
Certain general lifestyle choices can probably only help. Eating right, exercising, and getting your rest almost certainly will increase your overall quality of life. Being fiscally responsible probably means you won’t be plagued by thoughts of how wasteful it was to blow that cash on roulette every summer instead of saving up so your kid can go to college. But do we ever know if that one Vegas trip or lost weekend really makes a difference?
Even when considering things we might see as absolutely good in one way or another—giving to charity, say, or taking part in the democratic process—it’s often hard to imagine that our little part really makes a difference in the big picture. What happens if Greggory Moore doesn’t vote for Barbara Boxer in November or donate blood to the Red Cross next week? Even though I plan on doing both (because of the principles involved), it’s hard to see how my not doing them would change anything.
For almost all of us, our sphere of real influence is limited to the people we encounter in our day-to-day lives. And that’s where we have a definite chance to be a difference-maker.
We humans are social animals. There’s a philosophical school of thought holding that humans do not exist qua humans outside of a social context. But if that’s getting a bit esoteric, all you need to draw upon to grasp how much other people matter is your own memory. Obviously I don’t know most of you who are reading this, but I know enough about each of you—because there are some things common to us all—to know that you can recall several, perhaps hundreds of moments when someone said simple words to you that were, for better or for worse, HUGE. And I’ll bet in many cases the person who said it had no idea their particular utterance in that moment would matter so much, that you would be sitting here right now, all these years later, recalling it for the umpteenth time, feeling its impact and ruminating on how it shaped you. Maybe at the time even you yourself didn’t grasp that the words would stay with you. Such is the delicate idiosyncrasy of the human psyche.
On Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica, a first-person concept album wherein a man moves through a life that, despite his best efforts, always feels to him completely moribund, finally the narrator finds himself, in the midst of his dying, seeing all of the people he has met. Mournfully he intones, “I could have told you all that I love you,” over and over.
How many millions have felt this regret? Because, surely, being open with one another, acting on the willingness to be expressive of our feelings for those we love, is one achievement we know to be obtainable—and one that we know, from our own inner experience, to matter, to make a real difference. But how many of us find ourselves never really telling someone what we feel?
That we are stuck in the curious predicament of being social animals while being animals whose primary form of communication is this abstract employment of noises and symbols we call language is limiting, in so far as it takes us somewhat away from the simple, visceral form of relating relied upon by our non-linguistic animal kin. But at the same time it is a liberating state of affairs, in that it enables each of us to communicate something of our individualistic, private, inner world. If only we choose to do so.
I have a friend who, despite his love for The Moon and Antarctica, can’t listen to it. Too depressing, he says. I hear him. But to me it’s also inspiring. It’s inspiring because of that moment, that message: “I could have told you all that I love you.” It’s a cautionary tale, that line, a map of where not to go. It reminds me that I’m not there yet, that I’m not having that dreadful deathbed regret—and so to open myself up, to keep opening myself up, to tell people how I feel. That doesn’t mean mindlessly mouthing general phrases—as nice as it sounds, “I love you” gets bandied about so easily sometimes that it can mean less than a considered silence—but being willing to offer up the most accurate verbal renderings of exactly what I’m feeling.
I’m not saying I’ve got it down to a science, but I keep trying to do better. Because it’s one of the few definite things I can do, right here, right now, that just might matter.
It’s my best shot, and I’m going to take it.