Into the Dark
Love of mine, someday you will die
But I’ll be close behind, I’ll follow you into the dark
No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white
Just our hands clasped so tight, waiting for the hint of a spark
If Heaven and Hell decide that they both are satisfied
Illuminate the Nos on their vacancy signs
If there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks
Then I’ll follow you into the dark
~Death Cab for Cutie
I’m preoccupied with death. Of late.
Typically, the thought hits me in the early morning when my brain boots up out of its nightly dream defragmentation and my conscious operating system comes online.
Two people I knew died of cancer this year.
One was a childhood friend of my Ex, he was 58 and a pediatrician, and the other was my cousin, he was 43 and an architect. Both of them were phenomenal men who had a huge impact in their communities and in their professions. Both of them were dedicated family men, full of integrity and compassion, the kind of humans that would help you in a time of need, no questions asked. It’s not hyperbole. These were two of the good ones. It’s horribly unfair and I still cannot wrap my cerebrum around the injustice that turns good people’s bodies against them while evil people thrive.
I can never reconcile life and death and yet they are constant.
I’ve gravitated towards thoughts about death for most of my life. My own sense of mortality began before puberty. My parents separated when I was eleven and I have the vivid and distinct memory of when my world went from foggy to focused, a sort of refraction of my mind’s lens. Or like when Judy Garland’s Dorothy in the 1939 classic film Wizard of Oz lands in Oz and her world goes from black and white to color. My childhood was over. The countdown to the end had begun. Of course, the literature I was absorbing as a growing adolescent full of angst and sturm und drang didn’t help. What!? Camus, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Zola, and the Brontë sisters aren’t feel-good YA fiction?
I was what one would call a moody child.
My family nicknamed me Sarah Bernhardt. Funny and shitty, all at the same time. Because my feelings got dismissed a lot as overdramatic. It’s in my nature to be melancholy, but my parents’ divorce and the disappointments surrounding a family unraveling, and an overall Gen X cynicism, pushed me towards pessimism and nihilism as a core coping mechanism. I wasn’t clinically depressed. I never have been. I simply knew for myself, that I was ultimately by myself, on this earth. I figured this out early on and it scared the shit out of me.
I was raised in a secular home.
My father grew up in a conservative Jewish household but we were only educated in the cultural part, not the god part. He was a card carrying atheist. He knew when he was a young child that he didn’t believe and he had to go along with the “indoctrination”, as he called it. He resented the teachings that forced unquestioning obedience. Growing up during WWII, experiencing antisemitism, enduring the aftermath of family and friends exterminated, and feeling ostracized by “good church-going Christians” in his public school and in his neighborhood in 1930s/40s/50s Rochester, New York, reinforced the idea that he had to get as far away from god(s) as possible.
Like me, my mother grew up with an atheistic father. My grandfather rebelled against the Catholicism that had been incepted into his Puerto Rican culture and was proudly anti-god as well.
In my household, we didn’t celebrate holidays that had religious overtones. Which eliminated pretty much most of them. No Christmas. No Hanukkah. No He is Risen Easter. No Passover. Friends would express sympathy towards how difficult that must have been for me, but that was all I knew so I didn’t miss it. Plus my birthday is in the beginning of January. I got a celebration right after the biggest faith-as-holiday-retail season.
We did celebrate U.S. national holidays and I relished those days off from school. This was a time before any of these holidays were deemed problematic by today’s standards. So being an assimilated American was a-okay. Columbus Day. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The birthdays of our most cherished presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, now the one Presidents’ Day. Sorry kids, you get screwed out of two separate three-day weekends. Memorial Day. Independence Day. Labor Day. Veterans Day. Halloween. Thanksgiving. New Year’s Eve/Day.
The point being that celebrating culture or country were fine, even if some of those holidays had pagan roots, as long as an almighty supreme being wasn’t a primary part of it.
Today, I do make merry during the holiday seasons with friends and family. I don’t have a problem respecting and honoring other people’s belief systems. And decorating a pagan Christmas tree is fun AF.
I never had religion or a belief system to fall back on to comfort me.
When I went away to college, when I became a working adult who paid my own bills, away from my home life, I was free to explore. I had friends that would invite me to their church or synagogue, their Easter or Seder celebration, I didn’t have any Muslim friends until much later, and I had ample opportunity to embrace spirituality and a belief in something that isn’t tangible. I stayed open-minded and curious. I went to services. Nothing stuck. When I was going through my divorce, I would occasionally go the Catholic Church, my Ex-Husband’s chosen club, in my old neighborhood, thinking maybe the quiet and solitude would bring some levity to my darkest feelings.
All I felt was the same emptiness and sadness I felt in my own apartment, but now I was sitting in an opulent tax-exempt building on a tax exempt property in the neighborhood I helped gentrify but I could never afford to buy in.
God doesn’t resonate with me.
I feel no sense of belonging to or solace in a deity of any kind. Even the fun, mercurial ones like the ancient Greek and Roman gods or the Yoruba religion that flows through Santeria in my Puerto Rican roots. It isn’t logical to me. The idea of a soul and ghosts and an afterlife make zero sense in my brain. A god or gods, religion as a whole, simply does not compute.
There is no prayer to get me through hard financial times or illness or death. Or heartbreak. Which at times I thought was worse than death. I know it’s not. Because I feel the heartache. And the person who is responsible still exists. And moves on. And finds happiness. At least when I’m dead, I’m dead. Or when my Ex is dead, they’re dead. Either way, I don’t have to fucking know how much better off they are without me. I don’t wish my Ex death. He’s a decent dude.
Trying to grasp with my finite brain the infinite concept that the world will continue on and I’ll not even know I’m dead, doesn’t compute either. But hits me hard. There is the forever sleep, this black abyss, and I’ll be gone forever more. The lyrics and the melody of that Death Cab for Cutie song I quoted is haunting and heart-wrenchingly beautiful. Makes me tear up every single time I hear it. The song is a search for spirituality and a resolve that if by some chance heaven and hell doesn’t exist, the protagonist and his love will face the dark together.
For me, the only option is the darkness.
And I’m not okay with it. Death scares me. Our elders most often say it gets less fearful the longer you live. I’m not convinced yet. I’ll hopefully live a long enough life to find out. Not that it’ll matter. Because when I die, I won’t know. I wish I could believe in something outside this terrestrial plane that would bring me serenity, but I can’t. The idea of an afterlife feels like a giant fraud, a scam, a grift. I cannot lie to myself about this.
The irony is it’s not like any of my musings motivate me to embrace the “you only live once” motto with vigor. I can procrastinate as good as the best of them. I occasionally kill brain cells with cannabis. I will binge watch Marvel movies or drift through Instagram when I should be writing. And the pursuit of money has never been a reason for me to do anything. I see the hypocrisy in squandering precious time that can be gone in an instant. Doesn’t mean my noggin fully computes it.
While I worry about death, I am also grateful for my life.
I appreciate little things that make up my daily living. The hummingbirds that grace my garden. The orchids and money tree plants I care for. The feel of handmade cups I order from a ceramicist in Sonoma. Her name is Julie Cloutier. The delicious coffee my husband makes for me every morning in those cups. The employee at my local Trader Joe’s who always has a warm hello and friendly conversation and means it. The luxury of indoor plumbing and a hot shower and soap. My Tempur-Pedic bed and cool, crisp cotton sheets. A perfectly ripe and creamy avocado. A juicy strawberry. Clean water. Frozen juice pops.
I don’t talk about this subject with my friends.
I mean, we will talk about death, sure, because we experience the deaths of people we know and love and look up to, but an afterlife? God? No, I don’t go there. Because I don’t need to confront or convince anyone that what they believe is wrong. And I don’t need reassurance that how I think is right. I’m not concerned with what others believe as long as they leave me the fuck alone.
I won’t presume to tell anyone how to hold their beliefs as long as they offer me the same good faith. You go exercise your right to freedom of religion and I’ll go exercise my right to freedom from religion.
I have my own theory that people who proselytize or choose martyrdom in the name of their god, are lacking true belief. Because if their faith is strong, why do they give any thought or energy to the faithless? If we are sinners or infidels, why waste your time on us when you have supposedly found the true path? Isn’t your powerful god perfectly capable of condemning us nonbelievers all by himself? Why would an all powerful entity that created man and is greater than man need man to help with anything?
And that’s the other part of god I will never understand. It’s always a he, right? Why do women accept this as gospel when they have empirical evidence that human males who run the world often lie, cheat, and steal in order to retain power and status or just for kicks? If they lie about so many things, why can’t people see they could be lying about god too? They murder and molest and commit genocide in the name of god. If that’s not a reason to run as far away from man-made faith, then we may truly be doomed as a species.
No matter what anyone believes in or what I don’t believe in, death doesn’t care. The end result is one’s flesh is no longer inhabited with one’s consciousness and the pain of that is what’s left for the rest of us to process. Until our time comes.
My mother and I talk about death.
Not every day, but at her age, 88 going on 89, she sees the end coming. Each day is a gift when all the people close to her age are dying off. She has a burial insurance policy to handle her body/cremation and any minor expenses. She wants me to throw a party. Her mandate is to celebrate, not mourn. My hope is that her death is a fast and easy one. A long illness would be beyond crushing for both of us.
My Ex-in-laws both passed in the last few years. They had outlived almost all of their contemporaries. I didn’t have an opportunity to see them at the end or commiserate with their family since my Ex and I haven’t spoken in years. I saw the obituaries. I felt tremendous grief. They were lovely humans, and I had a deep fondness for both of them. We shared numerous celebrations and good times over a span of almost twenty years. If I think about them in terms of the finality of death, I will feel sad. But since I didn’t participate in any sort of ritual or logistics regarding their death and their remains, it’s almost as if they are out there in the world somewhere. Still living. I have all these cards and letters from my Ex-mother-in-law and it’s as if she’s with me. I dream about her too.
Some may say my dreams are her visiting, but I know that it’s just memories. Sweet memories frozen in time that have left neural pathways, an imprinting that I hope I will retain until my last breath.
My other fear besides death is cognitive decline. But once again, as my long deceased Aunt Thelma would say, if you’re in full blown dementia, and drooling on yourself, you won’t even know, so why worry about it? True, but I suppose I just don’t want to be a burden to some caregiver that feels resentful and potentially abuses my being through neglect or worse.
My ideal death is to live to be at least one-hundred and three, I like the number three, ambulatory and with full cognition, or the best it can be at that age, and I simply go to sleep one night and pass away peacefully. With my husband à la The Notebook. Or before my husband, obviously. He gets the burden of being the last one. I don’t have children so he or one of my nieces or one of our younger friends will be tasked with dealing with my remains. You’re welcome.
Should I be cremated? Be part of the newer green burial e.g. human composting? Or donate my body to a medical school?
The medical donation is a weird one because all I imagine is young medical students judging and joking about the size of my thighs and breasts. If my female body is policed by society in life, who says it stops once I’m no longer living? Ah, Womanhood. I can be insecure and vain, even in death.
Becoming a pile of ashes is fine, I could be spread across the ocean or sit on someone’s mantle in a fancy urn while they watch reruns of Law & Order, the Jerry Orbach as Detective Lennie Briscoe years, but why not be something that restores and preserves a natural habitat? I could become part of an underground fungal system that talks to a forest. Or maybe my contribution to that fungi will turn into a Last of Us cordyceps outbreak that infects mankind and turns the planet into an apocalyptic and dystopian wasteland. Cool.
There is some consolation in that thought. Not the apocalypse but the merging of my carbon-based life form into Mother Earth. I’ve contributed to the human race. Finally. My converted organic waste continuing the cycle of life. And death. Maybe I do have a little transcendental/metaphysical/mystical/spiritual thinking when it comes to death. And macabre as it is, I don’t need a sky daddy to get there. Just an Earth Mama to guide me.