Fussing, That's All

"Then he told them this story: “The farm of a certain rich man produced a terrific crop. He talked to himself: ‘What can I do? My barn isn’t big enough for this harvest.’ Then he said, ‘Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. Then I’ll gather in all my grain and goods, and I’ll say to myself, Self, you’ve done well! You’ve got it made and can now retire. Take it easy and have the time of your life!’

“Just then God showed up and said, ‘Fool! Tonight you die. And your barnful of goods—who gets it?’ “That’s what happens when you fill your barn with Self and not with God.”

―The Gospel of Luke, "The Parable of the Rich Fool"

*****

Dear Kate,

I am sure you are saying to yourself, Reading the quote above, I know exactly where you are going with it...

Do you?

Do you know exactly what you are doing, where you are going today?  Work, most likely, today being Moon-day, which, after the life-giving, life-affirming Sun-day, tends to bring out the more shadowy, intuitive, erratic side of our being?  I bet you don't know that.  Our Monday blues are meant to be grey.

Last night I shared a birthday cake with my father-in-law, who doesn't exactly double my age, but doubling or not it doesn't matter, the second half of life is not a repeat of the first, just as the moon today can't be expected a week from now.  Such is life, that's what you are expecting me to say next.  Such is death is what I have in mind.

Are you afraid of dying?

I am.

Last night I was really afraid, lying on my bed, I don't know why.  "Terror and amazement" had seized me when I thought about my age.  I think standing behind my father-in-law and having our picture taken with the same cake had something to do with it.  Mathematic too: I said the doubling doesn't matter but it does.  It speaks about a possibility that is empirically verifiable, the only certainty we all know.  We are dying, all the lot of us.  Say what we will to ourselves: death shall always be our first and final terror.

A friend told me last week that she's been taking care of an old lady dying of cancer.  She's not a nurse, not a relative, hardly a friend to this dying woman.  I don't know why I am doing this, she said.  Maybe it's because I can see my future in her.  My friend is taking care of her dying Self, not a bad reason to treat Others well, but hardly a hopeful one.  And that's my fear too, not really of moving on, but moving while I still can, yet hopelessly, meaninglessly.

How many meaningless thing are you going to do today to distract yourself from the thought of dying?  How many hopeless attempts are we going to make to suppress our "terror and amazement"?

You know how we use our thumb to flip through stuffs on our phone?  Clicking on a page, playing a video and just as quickly stopping it with another click and moving on?  We can't stop ourselves, can't we, keep going through stuffs, planning and fussing and fidgeting, anything but standing there, staring death in the eyes?  But, we say, death is not a somebody, something that we can have a conversation with and work things out.  We face nothing when we face death, the nothingness in us, the futility of it all; our life is Much Ado about Nothing.  Death is a terrorist who doesn't negotiate.

The rich fool in Jesus' parable above is fussing, that's all.  No big sin, the story hardly an exposé of human evil.  We can have ten houses under our name and still fussing for the eleventh and calling it a necessity.  We will never see our growth of wealth as a measure of the surge of our terror.  Your coffin will be exactly like mine, providing a generous space for one shriveling body.

I looked up the definition of the word coffin.  It means "a box for dead person."  I like the matter-of-factness of the ugly prose.

Yours, Alex