Edward’s Diary Entry 99: Living and Dying

I have been travelling for two weeks and adapting to difficult care and nursing situations… Yes, I've been visiting an American nursing home every day, where few come out warm and alive, as most are kept there to die. They come out stiff and cold, ready for the undertaker’s. Some are far gone and do not respond to stimuli very much, some manage a smile occasionally, whereas others are even joyous at times, maybe just recovering from an accident or fall. I gave as many patients as possible a chance to smile, I think. And now I am back home and have been met by another impending death. But just like the farmer philosopher said about her little lambs – that they were “born to die” – we too, as human beings, are all born to die and will pass sooner or later. It’s just a matter of time.

What disease and impending death should do for us is open the doors to Reality, and then we can apply this Reality to ourselves to become more cognizant of the fact that we are going to die, probably sooner rather than later, or probably sooner than we think we would like. Now what that does, if we are intelligent, is to strengthen our Awareness so we can live better lives now, at this very moment. We take the memory of a death as a message; or we take the news of an impending death as an encouragement to live more fully now. We cannot just break down and cry, or we mustn’t believe in crying if we do cry. If we need to cry, we cry; but this is just a reminder to our Awareness of Self that all of us must pass –  we too – and therefore we bow down to Reality, accept our mortality and make the best of our time here and now. All too often, unconscious immortality blinds us to both ourselves and others, and simply makes our lives more stressful.

So what I have done is to take two weeks as the limit. That's right: in two weeks I’ll be dead, and even that's a lot of time. This is because there is someone near and dear to me who will die in a few weeks, or a few months, or perhaps survive a year or so, but in any case his time is strictly limited, as we have recently been told. So now I walk the streets and look at everyone and imagine their death in only two weeks’ time. If they approach me I will treat them compassionately; I will never be angry with them; I will interact with them kindly; I will help them; I will show them love and compassion. And more. Because they are soon to die. There is no time to waste. What does it matter that I don’t even know them? Others know them; they have parents, children maybe, friends, relatives and workmates who will miss them. That is enough. Place yourself in that position and you will see. It doesn’t make any difference what difference you may happen to have with their opinions, ideas, beliefs or what have you. We are both goners. We’re both dead, in the long run or the short. We’re both only here for a brief time. So have mercy.

This means there is much less room, time or space for wasting time, getting angry, upset or impolite about anything, or picking fights. Because you know the clock is ticking away and you’ll soon see someone dying or experience death yourself – leaving the body behind all cold and stiff, and either Catholically being buried in concrete vaults (sorry no more stone: as if we didn't have enough concrete and asphalt while we're alive, it has to be concrete when we're dead, too!), or being cremated, packed up tight in a decorative urn and perhaps being thrown to the fishes or the worms.

The body will go; it is just physical and returns to its source – the Earth, as modern-day recyclers should know. The emotions were just intense impulses produced by a brain-mechanism made to produce them; from thoughts that were made to be produced by a mind fuelled by the same energy that pervades the whole universe. Both petty and (for humans) lofty thoughts were produced by that brain, that mind. But all is gone now. It’s all to be recycled, because we live in a sustainable world, where we create nothing, we destroy nothing; we only recycle it. Whatever lay behind that body producing emotions and thoughts, making such things possible, that Awareness or Consciousness, is perhaps washed clean and given another chance to seek out its own meaning in another life, who knows? What those who are left to live on this Earth can discover or can know, is that either we rise above body, emotion and mundane human thought, or we simply die and have to start all over again, or are destroyed forever. Either way, life is all we have when we have it, so why not live to discover what it really is? Or are we simply to believe what others and society tell us? Is that all we think there is? Impossible. Life goes on, the universe is functioning perfectly. It’s just we humans who can get into sync with it. Either living or dying. So at least let's give it a try. Today. Before it's too late.