MORTALITY

BY MY TROTH, I care not; a man can die but once: we owe God a death: I'll ne'er bear a base mind: an't be my destiny, so; an't be not, so: no man is too good to serve's prince; and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV

A friend's mother-in-law just died, and another friend's mum is teetering on the brink. Recently I lost my dear mentor, Matt Finn. What can you say to friends, what can you say to yourself, about death?

We can't understand how folks depart, leave the husk, and don’t return. It’s not in our human makeup to grasp this finality. They leave, gone, that's it. All that experience, all those stories, all that humor . . . Gone. How can that be?

I’m an old dog and I still can’t get my logic around it.

I’m not comfortable with churches. Despite my science reporter’s background (or, perhaps, because of it) I’m certain that a benign current underlies our reality. But I can’t support the idea of ghosts or heaven or souls, if only because it would be too damn comforting to have these hedges. So I don't expect the Ghost of Christmas Past or my Uncle Pete to shuffle through rattling chains. I don't expect to continue in any way after I check out.

What bothers me most is the reality of what was. How can a day forty-five years ago – in late fall on a hillside in the mountains of West Virginia, when hickory nuts fell from the trees rattling on branches, and I felt the soft hand of Becky Barlow’s hand in mine – not be as real as what I see outside my window now? How can my mother's pies not be still as fragrant as the moment before they were cut, still warm? I see those times, I very nearly smell that pie. Where is the day and the pie? I don’t know. It’s one of the basically disturbing things about being human, this awful backlog of afternoons and evenings, moments and loved ones, that don’t logically exist in the present. Where did they go? Aren’t they still somewhere?

When you’re older dreams take on more authority. They have as much reality as the news, or what you see at the supermarket. If those dreams have such power to jog my emotions and stir my spirit, what about those gleaming gems of memory – intense joy, understanding, grief, frustration, desolation? It's hard to believe they're not in some sideband of time, some back-file of reality.

Maybe my low blood pressure has something to do with these delusionary wonderings. When I get up quickly from any chair I swoon a bit, as the mass of my blood readjusts and causes new hydrostatic pressures in my brain. These bits of dizzy pause are unscripted by logic, current events or the flow of conversation. It's possible these transient lapses predispose me to see the world as less that absolute, a garment sewn up loosely.

My doubts about the absolute nature of reality don't seem to affect my skeptical regard for acupuncture, chiropractic, Scientology, homeopathy or prayer breakfasts, but it casts a shadow of doubt on the whole damn river of time.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

As Himself grows older, he's more aware of his own lapses of sanity, as well as these lapses of swooning consciousness. He's often confided that he's crazier than he thought he was. One of his recurring fears is that he's lost critical opportunities because folks can sense his instability. True, he's a nutball, but I have less respect for most people's sensitivity than he does. The great majority of humanity wouldn't know their ass fell off unless they sat down quickly.