When Death Becomes Life

“Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death — it’s something that happens to you and those around you. But... actively engage with death, grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in doing so, to confront the meaning of a life.”

By Paul Kalanithi, "When Breath Becomes Air"

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Dear Alex,

How absurd to talk of death in Spring! Traffic is steaming, buds bursting, hearts enraptured. More sun, more time to being, doing, dreaming in breaths and beats - all numbered, capped by mortality.

Each day we seek death in burying our disappointments, bad habits, dark impulses. The old and obsolete must go to grant room for fresh, new ones.

Last night I yielded to the death of logic and bought something I had doubted: a transcontinental flight ticket for my daughter to attend a K-pop concert. I will be working many hours to compensate for the gift. The first and last time I recall paying for a music concert was over 8 years ago when I listened to a German classical pianist in an auditorium accessible within 15 min of driving from home.

A new, mysterious force is renewing my life with my daughter. In the birth of Spring, she and I are dying within the constraints of our decisions. We consume massively in recreation that recoils its head to consume us in masses. In choosing our desired stuff, we become the stuff of slavery by choice.

I still wonder if this recreational pursuit may effect the birth of a re-created experience or the death of freedom for me, my daughter and the hordes of K-pop worshippers. With fans divested of their valuables and invested in idolized values, these K-pop lyrics seem to satiate deeply hungry souls in gaping need for existential meaning which words like mine cannot seem to explore in equal magnitude.

Spring cycles from decay to birth, pollen to dust, encroaching upon the garden for the dying to thrive more helplessly among the helpless. As alluded in the commentary to your poetry, we flourish over the span of years with the creation of deciduous fruit trees. Through longer years we strain in the re-creation of life sprung from death to measures beyond the circumference of a harvesting basket.

Death is Spring in our reclaiming of new shapes of selves, our creation and re-creation of gifts grander than the dimensions of a travel ticket.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

What if we are to narrowly escape death, what would that do to our subsequent living?

Dostoevsky suggests it might turn us into an idiot of some sort, now being summoned to look at everything anew, take nothing for granted, experience life again and this time truly, every little splendor of it, with childlike wonder.

But that is Dostoevsky, and that is him and his "Idiot."  I am not sure if that is true for everyone, or even many enough, who has brushed shoulder with death and got lucky.

Usually when we learned about unreasonable deaths (if there ever is such a thing) we would say, Yeah, we should better cherish life and our loved ones, make the best of everyday.  The intention might be there and the intensity too, even if only a brief uptick, but what does such "re-consecration" of life actually entail?

Coming up with a "bucket list," perhaps?  And what would we find in our bucket?  Traveling more?  Eating more of our favorites?  Finally picking up dancing, moving forward with our business aspiration?

More likely the same old.

Would we quit our job and "live more of life"?  Stop worrying about things that we know all along to be inconsequential?  Walk more and drive less to smell the flowers, drink up the rain, kiss the sunshine, love more and hate less, praise more and complain less--like an idiot?

The transitory heightened awareness of death, if anything, only calls our attention to the same old insecurities and questions that, like death itself, will never go away.  If death is so very palpable, we say, then what shall we do now to feel less of it?  What should we do to make sure it won't lurk around the next corner like it did the last?  We will more likely take a step back, check things twice, give less and take more, act like a victim, not a victor.

Death happens to us, we feel.  But how can it be?  Death is a negation of what was once affirmed, an abeyance of what used to be buoyant.  It is a final nothing.  How can nothing do something to us?

The end speaks only about what has gone on before.  What comes after is a mystery of a different sort.  If we did brush shoulder with death and feel it true, then our subsequent living could be an unveiling of life in the here and now, an ongoing mystery that we are informed and convinced to be not mysterious at all and no wonder so susceptible to trivializing and pillaging, reducing and wasting.

Can death be the beginning of life, the genius of an idiot?

Yours, Alex