Death as life.....

A person has two unavoidable steps in the process we call life.

We are born and we die.

It takes many many years to actually realize we are, in fact, alive.  The fact of being alive doesn't really occur to a child.  Life is all we know.  We don't question our existence one way or another.  Even if the death of someone else happens within our small world, it is still a very abstract concept.  The adults give us stories of heaven or some other explanation with which they are comfortable.  As children, all we really know is that the person who is now dead, or passed on (as it is euphemistically said), is no longer around.  

Our childish world goes on ... and yet it does expand year to year.  At some point the death of someone close to us, quite suddenly, hurts.  Our psyche experiences a new emotion and we call this loss.  Thereafter every time someone we know passes the emotional impact sticks with us.  We start remembering each death.  Depending on the closeness of the person to us; a relative or long time friend, that death has a greater or lesser impact on our lives.  Even to the effect of changing the direction of our own lives.

There is a special group of people in the life of each one of us.  We call them parents.  Whether or not these parents are of the same genetic material as each of us, or not, is of not as much consequence as that these are the adults who cared for us as children.  And whether or not these parents were particularly good at parenting, or not, also, in the overall, is not so much a major factor in terms of the idea I am putting forth here.

There is someone, or two - a mother and a father, one or the other or both - from whom we emotionally declare the origin of our lives.  Our real lives as we enter into the realm of adulthood.  We look back and say in our minds, "I remember this person as being my mother-father."

Somewhere in my own memory, from reading or television ... could be either one, a quote, "You are never free until both of your parents are dead."  

My mother passed some three ago, as of this writing.  I sit, at this moment, in Hospice as my father is dieing.  These just happen to be my genetic parents.  My mother was nearly ninety and my father is ninety-five.  Very long active lives.  Globe hopping adventurous lives.  A world war survived.  Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.

And long tortuous painful drugged out declines into death.  Very difficult to witness.  A sense that death comes as a relief.  Not a release from life, but a relief from maybe too much life.  A relief from life gone on longer than a human body is supposed to live.  A spirit that seems to refuse to accept that the play is over and it's time to exit the stage.

The circumstances of every human beings death is as unique as their very lives up to that time.  Quickly as from a fatal accident, combat in a war, rapid degenerative disease, victim of violence - each person's final moments are as historically distinctive as their DNA.   For many who were childless, death might be seen as less important, but in fact if their death precedes that of their mother-father then it is possible they are ones who have been granted an extended benefit.  To them life was eternal until it simply stopped.

To me, my objective with this essay, is to observe that; death is as much a part of life as birth.  The facts are these; prior to birth we have no true knowledge, from the vantage point of being alive we have no true knowledge beyond our own death.  

I accept that there are those people of faith who vehemently disagree with me.  And I also accept that this world of faith is how they personally view life and everything.  But faith is not fact and facts are mostly simple and brief and, truthfully, universally few.  

Therefore it is only from the point of coming of age, where we recognize and accept those whom we know as our parents, up to the point when they die, is it possible to have a true knowledge of what is death.  

After that point, that place in our awareness, suddenly, almost shockingly we are free.  At the same time, for a time, we also feel abandoned in a sense of timelessness.  Once the shock wears off, once all the grieving is done, once that sense of freedom becomes our new day to day experience, that is when I think it is possible to actually see, to review as in viewing again but anew, our own lives.

And, I postulate, that it is only at the death of our parent, or parents, can we truly conceive of our own death as being just another part of our own life.