12:37pm June 21, 2013

The world seems so full of life to me.

I’m reminded of this in the life and death tag when I encounter a Bukowski quote: “Most people’s deaths are a sham: there’s nothing left to die.”!

I can’t believe that when I think of the people I know who’ve died, or the people I know who will die one day. Almost all, full of life. Full of the world around us, full. Not empty, the way Bukowski would have it.

Right now, I am full of the warmth of a patchwork quilt that covers me from toes to shoulders. The love of a grey elderly cat who snuggles up to my right shoulder.

And since this culture sees old age as connected with both death and emptiness, there is nothing about Fey that is already dead. Every year, she deepens. Every year, that depth fills her with life. She could go this year, next year, many years from now. But I know that depth makes her more full of life than ever. She’s deepening in the way that happens to the best old people.

And it’s not a process that depends on having all your cognitive faculties intact. I’ve met so many people with dementia. Everyone treated them as hollow shells of who they once were. But looking closely you could see that the passage of time had given many of them a depth and beauty that had nothing to do with memory or cognition.

There’s so much more to us than the parts of our minds that can start to go. I wish this culture recognized all those other things. Elderly people would be treated much differently, so would younger people with cognitive impairment.

I have health conditions that want to be sly with me. They won’t give me a specific time-frame for when I am likely to die. But they are life threatening. They tell me I can die tonight the moment I go to sleep. Our they tell me I could survive decades and die of something else. What do you call that? Not terminal. Precarious maybe.

I am precariously ill, and that makes me think of death all the time. Not in a depressing way. More like I’ve got to come to terms with the fact it could happen at any time. To me. That’s a lot of heavy thoughts for someone right on the lower edge of middle age, wondering how far into middle age I’m likely to get.

But the thoughts become matter of fact. They aren’t meant to be depressing. They’re just what you think about when you’re precariously ill and trying to wrap your head around whether you’ll be here tomorrow, in weeks, in years. Whether you’ll see old age. Whether a person really needs to, in a world where it’s normal for children and young adults to die all the time. Where only certain advantages in life make people so sure they will survive to old age.

But right now the idea that has me captivated and somewhat appalled is the one that says death barely matters because by the time we get there, we are already dead. I’m sure it’s intended to be some Meaningful Philosophical Utterance. But it just sounds to me like world weary cynicism, fairly well calculated to sound like what it is. I know all the quotes surrounding it. That only makes it worse. It just doesn’t ring true. There’s nothing deep our meaningful about it. Pessimism doesn’t make something real.

What I’ve observed is life everywhere. Life connected to life, connected to everything. Connected in ways most people aren’t even aware of. People connect to each other so deeply they are almost two branches of one soul. People connected deeply to everything around them, living out otherwise. Life is filled to overflowing with life, with the world around it, with everything it’s possible to be connected with. There’s states of mind that can make us unaware of this, but lack of awareness of something, or lack of belief, no matter how intense, don’t make it go away.

The world is so full of life and meaning you can’t possibly run out of it. Whether it’s what people usually call life like animals and plants, or other things like rocks and air. There is a richness to existence that can’t be exhausted. And we are part of that existence. So even when we are despondent, that’s still there. Not being able to perceive something isn’t the same as something not being there.

What is there? Life. And life is here for everyone. Someone once told me that I would never understand the richness in life that I was missing. I replied that the richness in life is so deep that it’s impossible for a perceptual disability to limit it. There’s so much of it that there is always more than anyone can experience. No matter what limitations a person has on their experiences of the world, they are still just as saturated with it as the average person. And that is why I an able to be as full of life as any person is able to be. Life is like love, it has no limit.

These are not platitudes when spoken by someone who now spends most of my life in bed, in a great deal of pain, and all the other stuff that could and does lead people to write off my life. There’s nothing sickly sweet about this. There’s just this vibrant thing called life that seems to exist in everyone whether we see it or not. And that’s what’s wrong with the quote. Most people who die are still living right up until their deaths. They aren’t dead long beforehand. I mean you do catch the occasional person you could say that about, but they’re far from most people.

In fact that’s one of the questions I’ve had to ask many times when people know died: How could they be so alive and just not exist anymore? How is there a world without them in it? That’s not a question you have to ask if everyone stops living long before they die. I guess I’ll always see a world so full of life that death seems strange and mysterious, probably up to the day I die myself.

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