Why is it we keep dates with death?
As the day approaches I find myself thinking of visiting. Paying my respects. But who am I visiting? A shell, and probably not even that since time has undoubtedly done its damage. I would be visiting a pile of bones in a box in the ground, hardly the person I knew in life. But in the beginning I used to treat it much like you’d expect, visiting and speaking and pretending that I could be heard. But I realized something. I’ve realized that “paying your respects“, for me at least, is just another way of reminding yourself of a self-imposed responsibility, albeit an unconscious one but nevertheless a very powerful one. You don’t need to do anything. People only do things if they feel it will make them feel better, holding funerals and visiting grave sites are no exclusion to this. I don’t believe the dead are looking down and tallying the number of visitors to their grave on the anniversary of their death day. I think there is a guilt attached to this scenario, a shame we make ourselves feel if we don’t show our love for a person. But who are we really showing that love to? We are showing it to ourselves, reminding ourselves of the love we had/have for that person. The funeral isn’t for the dead, they’re already gone; the funeral is for everyone left behind. The dead need no closure. We’ve created a formal ceremony to assist us in accepting, and dealing with, death. By way of a social event we create an environment conducive to closure. We’ve outlined a process for grief, stages that provide us with a signal in the storm that let us know whereabouts we are on the path to acceptance. But if these things were created by us, why then must I rely on formalities to find peace?
In direct opposition of what is commonly believed, I find comfort in believing that the dead aren’t watching us. That they can’t hear what we say or think, that death isn’t some kind of “great revealing” of our emotions and intentions to the deceased. How I feel and felt are no longer important to the person that’s no longer here.
We don’t bury our dead. We keep them alive in photographs and home movies, in memories and dreams, in heartaches. They can only ever truly die if we let them. Until that time, we carry them around with us and fall asleep with them in mind, we make appointments with them on their birthday to see how they are and to let them know how we are. Giving a potentially nonexistent thing such power over us can be a burden. But if holding on is something that helps you get through the day, I think you should do what makes you happy. Reliving old lives and imagining ones that can now never be seems fruitless to me, but if they provide some sense of consolation I am in no position to attack that and extend my view as the only answer.
When you believe something it no longer feels like belief, it becomes a “knowing”. So, in knowing that no one’s there I feel better about my life and my ability to let that which is impermanent slip easily through my fingers. Crushing the sand tightly in my hand hasn’t slowed or reversed the hour because there’s nothing tangible to hold onto. And that is a great reminder of how precious a thing life is. But when it’s time for that life to go, there’s no need to hold on because there isn’t anything there to hold onto.
