A lot of calculating ages. Reading epitaphs. Wondering about or imagining people's stories when loved ones died. Noting people who were born in the late 1860s and when they died, relating that to myself having been born in the late 1960s, and calculating up a hundred years and considering all these various years I might die, given a natural death. 2018, 2037, 2055.
Spending time with entire families buried together and just being fascinated by the past-and-gone existence of these whole families, noting how old the mothers were when they gave birth to each of the children, how old were the children when the parents died, how long spouses outlived each other, and if they didn't have spouses, did they not get married or were the spouses buried with their own families?
All of this information, and relating it to people I know in the very midst of the life cycle. I know people of all different ages, getting married, having children, parents and relatives dying, and life goes wonderfully and tragically on and on.
Life really is more lovely when you accept death as part of it. Instead, we do our best to ignore death and put it off. When we're barraged by ridiculous pharmaceutical commercials at dinner time, we never think where death fits in the picture. They shill conjured notions of health and prolonging life (nevermind quality, which is an assumed by-product of getting doped up on whatever they're selling), and the subtext of death is completely sublimated.
But no, we avoid it, it's depressing. We're trying to live our lives and meditations on death dampen that, not enrich it. God forbid we think too deeply on what's the point of all we're doing and striving for.
Maybe if we think about death, we think about how we're going to lose everything when we die, and that's too depressing, too dysfunctional. We're not taught or trained to think of death and use those thoughts to make our moments alive now meaningful.
The Tibetan path to enlightenment starts with meditations on death, right up front. Well, right after meditating on our wonderful, blessed human existence, endowed with opportunity and freedom to transform ourselves spiritually. Right after that, you meditate on the absolute certainty of death, really confront it, and the absolute uncertainty of when death will come. I'm under the impression that Tibetans, as a society, handle that quite well. Americans, I shouldn't wonder, find that horribly morbid.
Being philosophically suicidal for as long as I've been, I had a leg up when introduced to those meditations. Old hat. Been there, done that. But today's time in the cemetery had the curious effect of both making me really glad that I'm suicidal – not striving for the things everyone else seems to be striving for, and loving life and our planet and everything on it – being glad to be alive.
December 13, 1996 - Colma, CA
