Because I could not stop for Death -- He kindly stopped for me

Writing on death is staring into the Abyss; we must therefore proceed with caution.

Death is not merely a natural, but a necessary part of life. The merely natural does not require value; it, simply, is and nothing more. The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s, and one need not have an opinion about this. Something that is necessary makes a greater demand – it must be valued. Indifference hides under covers and does not respond when called upon; the necessary must be loved for doing what needs to be done. Death makes life possible, and the fanfare for the latter should include the former. The living must love death as they do their lives, and for the same reason.

This is easy enough in the abstract; however, in reality, ‘the living’ is a body made up by individual living beings, few of which see existence, if they can at all, in terms this broad. For the individual, existence is in each case ‘mine’ – rightly so. But insofar as this ‘mine’ implies ownership it implies that it is invariably temporary – the owned object is eventually either destroyed or passed along. This ‘object’ being life, it would be incoherent to destroy it to avoid passing it along. Homicide is limited; genocide never works; suicide is passing life along to others.

Some years back I read Gertrude Stein’s Geographical History of America, in which she notes that death creates the space in which new life grows. There is a reason why new, stronger, and deadlier diseases proliferate as science disposes of those that had plagued us. There is something nicer than symmetry or irony to the fact that one contracts AIDS by fucking, botulism by eating and Ebola by breathing. It has to be this way; it is best this way. If solutions were found to world hunger, war, and the existing fatal diseases, death would find a new avenue to come ripping down. Death follows the ultimate agile business model, to our benefit.

But it’s hard for the individual, who like Beckett’s Hamm commits a synecdochal fallacy, conflating his own existence and existence as a whole, to see this, and to swallow it once seen. ‘What does it matter that the world endures if I don’t?’ No individual wants to see his ineluctable death as a means to the lives of others. No worldview is less sympathetic to the individual’s self-importance than one that sees him as a means to some group’s end-less continuance. This cuts man down to an intolerably small size. Yet this is the way the world bobs in Darwin’s wake; man is seen in context, and though he once seemed the Titanic, even that is small to the ocean. Not smaller than before, but having lost the semblance of largeness through contextualization.

How is this to be reconciled with one’s belief in one’s own importance? How can one consign oneself to a soldier’s or a martyr’s death in the absence of such extraordinary circumstances? How can he live knowing his ultimate purpose to be the endless perpetuation of the ordinary? Is it surprising that we flee headlong from death, trading hysterical stories of an eternal life safely tucked away beyond the confines of observation?

The answer is simple: As you will die in order for the lives of others to become possible, so too have others died for you. This is a gift that, for as long as possible, must be taken advantage of to the fullest. You can’t keep it forever, however you try, but you do have it now. Say ‘yes’ to life.