Frankly Put: Contemplating Death and Mortality
This isn’t a call for help. Before you hit me up to try and convince me that life is worth living and people would miss me, allow me to assure you that it isn’t that type of reflection. Carry that curiosity and walk with me here.
(Probably should put this here, TW: death. If this is something you are not ready to have a conversation over, perhaps stop yourself here. Should you be interested, welcome to a small inkling of how my brain works.)
I recognise that the title can have a greatly negative paradigm and in some ways, I embrace it (Haha, clickbait!). Lately, it has been something that I found myself questioning a little more on days I feel good. What’s more, is that I am not coming out of the thought in a doom and gloom headspace. This isn’t suicidal thought and I think in some ways it has the opposite effect on my mind.
I remember being younger and the conversations on death and mortality were a little bit hushed. It is understandable. The young mind is impressionable and at the same time, how do you explain something we know so little about to someone who knows so little? It was always said, “Live your life like today could be your last day,” to get us to live our lives to the fullest and I have run the thought through my mind like “Why though?” No seriously, why? Why do I say it? This frustratingly romantic way of trying to get someone to live in the now.
These past (nearly) two years have been a mess and the effect on the mental has been greatly felt. I mean, I have seen people gain sunshine in their lives. I’ve seen people lose warmth behind their eyes too. It is shaking how wild it is to have perspective shifted so sharply. I ask myself did I even take the time to understand what the numbers on the screen meant when they would rise and fall? Was it always just a gauge for that long-awaited address to tell us whether we could be outside past certain times? Or was there a piece of my heart that understood gratitude a little more?
Now here I am, looking through my own thoughts to dig up whatever that means to me. I’m tearing away at the negative wall to see what those little beams of light shooting from the crevices could be. Philosophers and Buddhists may have it right in that indeed that light does exist from behind that wall. Maybe there is happiness that can be found in the contemplation of death.
Another thing I am coming to terms with is the fact that death could be symbolic. Death doesn’t have to be final rest but it still seems to have the same effects. The grieving process, the hollowness and longing. There is this quote, I think it is by Sigmund Freud that says, “You aren’t a man until your father dies.” and that death need not be literal — another thinker adds on.
Sitting with this perspective opened my eyes to the many ways that death has occurred beneath my nose and I have carried grief without noticing the weight on my shoulders. I don’t think I took the time to fully grasp it. In this case, what the quote alludes to, in a paraphrased and bastardised interrogation, is there comes a time when those we depend on may not have the answers to the questions we ask and that in a sense is a death. They are dead to you in that regard.
However, what happens when the person you are depending on is you? What happens when you lack those answers? Who will bury the body of the now-deceased persona that is you? I mean it is just a thought but it is also a realization that I never give myself the grace to acknowledge the grief of losing parts of me. I am not taking the time to call out to those moments when parts of me breathe their last breath.
Just off the top of my head, I can tell in some ways I am dying, for one the light of passion within me has days when it is dwindling. I look back to all the times I have lost interest in things that once brought life to my day-to-day. The things I once enjoyed, now just look so lack-lustre and we call that getting older but in some ways, it is just the death of the child within.
Maybe there is truth when we say we are “working ourselves to death”. There is a piece of us that dies with every bit of our being that we invest into the thing that doesn’t bring us peace and burnout is just the body, mind and spirit screaming this out. The relationships we put ourselves through that drain us, probably do the same. What’s there to argue with when heartbreak feels like a piece of us just died?
Like the Buddhist monks, perhaps there is a joy to life that we can derive from contemplating our fleeting mortality and perhaps that is where I am now. It isn’t to the extent of sitting in cemeteries to meditate though, that’s just on a mad level. Instead, I am going with the flow of life, understanding YOLO from a more grounded point of view. I think here, the music sounds better, the water tastes sweeter, the air smells fresher, the love feels deeper.
Maybe I am working myself to death. Maybe there are days where there is the death of my creativity because of it. Am I willing to find the gratitude, the peace, the joy in the realization at those points? Am I allowing myself the silent resignation to the truth that my time is finite and this calls for greater appreciation of the things in life that actually matter to me?
The actions I take every day in love, kindness and thoughtfulness are really just an affirmation, momento mori, to put it Frankly.
