A few weeks ago, one of Z’s teammates lost his dad. I didn’t know the man, and I don’t know the details. But I used to see him at every one of the wrestling meets. Walking around, usually alone. Engaged in what was happening. Paying attention to all the matches. Watching and encouraging his son, especially.
And now this man is gone. He existed on the earth so briefly. His life was happening, an ongoing event, concurrent with mine and yours and billions of others. Now it isn’t. Our little threads keep going, twisting and turning, overlapping and knotting, twining and wrapping all around each other. But we are less, collectively. One thread, this man’s life, cut off by a combination of factors I don’t know. But I do know one of them, perhaps the main one, was despair.
Death is in the room with us. Death is sitting next to us. Death is walking in and out of the door. Death is on the corner. Death is in the car. Death is in the silence and in the laughter and in the meeting of eyes and in the looking away.
I don’t know what the lesson is, or if there is one. I’ve watched death happen, seen the moment when the lungs empty and don’t fill again. It’s not really a moment, though. It’s moments, strung together, breaths becoming shallower, blood pressure dropping, heart slowing. It took longer than I expected. The body letting go even as the consciousness holds on.
Death seems insurmountable and abrupt. A swift end, a slammed door. Maybe that’s how it is, sometimes.
But sometimes it is looming and silent, padding in soft, a slowly expanding shadow.
And sometimes it’s the mind that betrays us, hands us over. The body fights. The body clings to life. The body may be full of the possibility of days and years, but the mind has already laid down under that shadow.
We are strong, as a species. Adaptable and clever. Quick with our hands, quick with learning, with tools, with patterns, with communication. Quick to puzzle out answers, quick to imagine possibilities.
But despair, a disease, creeps in below the level of our quickness.
I don’t know what the lesson is. I don’t think there is one. Perhaps just a reminder to myself, written here. Death is in the room. Try not to look away.