Link to Reading
Loved this perspective on death — not a collapse of our entire being, some abrupt end to everything we constitute, but a simple halt of the verb that we are. Maybe the metaphor won’t land quite the same to all of us, and the prospect remains frightening, but there is always value in gaining new perspective on the things that scare or confuse us.
If I wasn’t a fixed, knowable self, then I hadn’t failed to be one. And if I was an event in motion – like a breeze, or a flame, or a wave – then I didn’t need to locate myself. I could start to imagine my personhood not as a thing but as a roiling together of body and breath, memory and mood, ceaselessly shifting thoughts and perceptions, all braiding with the rest of the world in a pattern that could never be repeated.
As our work continued, he didn’t stop being afraid. But something in the shape of the fear began to shift, and ultimately to lighten. ‘I still get scared,’ he told me, ‘but I think I thought I was going to disappear like a statue being knocked off a ledge. Now it feels more like I’ll just… stop happening. Like a breeze.’
Many of us mistakenly think of death as the opposite of life: life is a state, so death must be one too. But death isn’t the opposite of life. It isn’t a state at all. It exists only as something we imagine, as an idea, which means it exists only within life. It’s not an experience we have, but a noun we invented to describe the ceasing of a verb.