Is Death Easy or Difficult?

Theme song: Elegie

This post is for Lee Shea, who -- at least several months ago -- had been thinking a lot about death. Not because she's sad or dying, but just because death is so very interesting.

The thing is, I'm pretty sure every single thing that needs to be said about death has already been said, and said well. That's the downside of trying to be a writer in the 21st century. The upside is that most people really hate to think about death and so, for many, any comments about death come as fresh news. Often, when I write or talk about death, people look at me as if I am a stinker for having invented it.

Like Lee, I think death is interesting. It's no surprise, then, that the question of whether death is easy or difficult popped into my head as I was drifting off to sleep. I hopped up out of bed and jotted down a few thoughts so I wouldn't forget them and off to sleep I went.

I am systematically binge watching Law and Order: SVU, and most people on the show die very easily. Except when they don't. Sometimes characters survive for days stuffed into a refrigerator only to be saved at the last possible moment by Mariska Hartigay and team; not infrequently characters survive suicide attempts.

I read once that dying is actually kind of tough. In movies and on TV they make it look easy to kill people but, in reality, the reason people are stabbed 27 times is because that's often what it takes! As a whole, the human body works hard to keep itself alive. It seems our lives hang by a thread, and they do, but there is also an element of tenacity that I find fascinating.

So I think about the indomitable human spirit which will go on being indomitable until it isn't. People survive things that are simply incredible, don't they? And what about all the people and things that are gone and that no one even remembers were ever here? Extinct things that are unavailable to our conscious minds. Are these things gone, or did they in some way birth us, or are their energetics hovering around us as ghosts?

Some of you will be familiar with the concepts of matter, energy, and fields. Matter has mass, energy moves mass, and fields are where it all happens (Einstein, please don't roll over in your grave if you are reading this. And that goes for you, too, Newton!). They say energy cannot be destroyed.

Is the energy that animates me completely separate from me? What am I made out of? What are my thoughts and feelings made of? If they aren't made of anything, can they be said to exist? What is it that animates feelings, if not energy? And if energy cannot be destroyed, then where do my feelings go when the tears have dried?

My own pet theory is that the debate about the differences between these concepts will soon enough go by the wayside in favor of understanding the ways in which all three (matter, energy, and fields) are interconnected, not really separate, and come from the same source.

This pet theory supports my other pet theory that death doesn't really exist along side the paradox that everything we know and love, as we know and love it, including ourselves, is destined to go.

Volumes and volumes and volumes devoted to figuring out what the H*** is going on just in time to cease. Think about all the words, ink, paper, and now digital formats, that cover these topics with endless (until it ends) debate.

Shakespeare had it right:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.

And the Buddha, before him:

The world is afflicted with death and decay. But the wise do not grieve, having realized the nature of the world.

Personally, I find the decay piece a little more worrying than the death piece. Death, such as it is, is but a moment. Decay is one of those ongoing things that have to be lived with (still, rust is pretty).

I think we've all known, or heard of, people who died suddenly and unexpectedly; those who outlived their prognoses; and those who survived events that seem unsurvivable.

Sometimes death is easy and sometimes it is difficult. Which way will it go becomes the question.

Since we as humans have so little control over death, the answer for us is to show up fully for life and death as they are, on their terms. If it's difficult, feel the difficulty. If it's easy, feel the ease. Or go a step further, and do not decide whether it is easy or difficult, but strive to feel it one beat at a time, as it is, nothing added, nothing stripped away.

Until you don't. Because someday you won't.