Interdependence and Dying
Every day I wake up in the morning without a job, and I start to panic again.
What am I going to do? How am I going to pay rent? What if I have to go back to telemarketing? …I don’t know if I have enough soul left to crush after my first stint in that business. My second will surely leave me without one.
It’s as I start thinking about what my parents will say that I realize I’m beginning to give myself the option of failure. That by focusing on unknowns, I’m robbing myself of agency to solve my problems. That realization helps me focus up.
It’s also right around when I start thinking about my parents, that I start to take heart.
I know that failure will not kill me.
It will be painful to fail, but it will not kill me.
And that’s something to be grateful for.
That’s something not everyone has.
I realize that even with all my professional concerns — my woes and wishes, as they were — I’m still lucky.
I’m lucky to exist.
I’m lucky to be healthy, and loved.
I’m lucky to have the capacity to learn and to improve myself.
This last one is the one which sets me back along my path toward whatever it is I’m pursuing.
My knowing that I am able, and counting my able-ness as something to be grateful for, has gotten me out of more mental/emotional/psychological slumps than I would like to admit I had ever been in to begin with.
After all, if you’re not doing then what’s the point of being?
We are all faced with the finite nature of ourselves at some time or another.
We may leave a lasting impression after we are gone, but we only have so much time to do in this place.
My morningly macabre, as much as it is difficult to stomach, due to the existential nausea it induces, is one which I return to often, to remind myself that no matter the cost to my comfort or my immediate happiness, I must continue.
The shear limitedness of myself is the reason.
Someday I will not have the opportunity to do, because I will not be. So I am responsible to myself and to everyone else to take what opportunity I have, to do.
The stoics summed this sentiment up in the phrase “Memento Mori,” translated, “Remember death.”
Death has been hard for me to forget since last year.
In February of 2019 I lost my paternal and maternal grandfathers within 24 hours of each other.
Any mourning experience is a trying one, but something about not being able to individually process the passing of these men I admired made it so that the concept I felt myself addressing more than either of their absences was the common enemy between them.
They both had ceased to be.
They had met their end, and there would be no more of them.
And yet… the sudden absence of them from the world had not slowed it, or set it ablaze, or apparently changed it in any way at all.
Everything just kept going.
It occurred to me after some time that as much as they were not around, the things they said and did lingered on. In me. And in my parents. And my brothers, and cousins, and aunts, and uncles. Even in my grandfathers’ friends, who I didn’t know as well. Those individuals who they must have interacted with throughout their lives, whom I never had the opportunity to meet.
Every person we come across, in fact, is another touch point of our existence.
They are who will remember us when we are gone. They are who our words and actions will inspire or weigh on.
I came to realize that the Christian “Heaven,” which the Church sells so eagerly just days after our loved ones have have been removed from our embraces, is not a place.
It is a memory.
It is many memories.
It is the way our presence is felt on Earth after we are gone. The effect of ourselves.
As is hell, likewise.
If we influence people positively, then those who are left knowing us after we are gone have those memories of us to go forward with, and to change the world.
If we influence people negatively, then ours will not be equipped to deal with the future which we are not there to see them through.
This is the inspirational value I take from death.
I am able to remind myself in contemplating my end that every decision prior to that end is mine to make, and that every person everywhere is a witness to my decisions.
I earn my place in heaven or in hell as I go through life. With every act of courage, and justice, and kindness; I create a more righteous home for my fellows.
I create on Earth that place which the Christians sell.
Remembering death encourages me to live. I have a moral debt to those who came before me, which I can only pay to those who come after.
Maybe you have another inspirational trick that’s less morbid… more whimsical… less tragic.
I would be happy to hear it.
If you do not, then I hope that death may be the inspiration you seek in life, as it has become, in part, for me.