I went on an afternoon hike...alone, but not by myself. I carried The Dead on my back. Hang on! The Dead has a name, but I cannot give you his name - laws and such. Without a name we lose his humanity so in this episode I'll call The Dead "YOU." I had Mr. YOU tucked away in my backpack, not femurs and rotting tissue, but gray dust. Gray dust bagged in dead animals (plastic), boxed in more dead animals (plastic), and protected by dead trees (cardboard). So much death to honor death. And I carried The Dead to free him from a bookshelf. It's an odd place for a dead human. But he sat there for a decade, his dust gathering dust atop a storage place for words...words which are much more alive than YOU was.
I know what you are asking, "Why do you have a dead person on your bookshelf?" It wasn't my bookshelf...and it should suffice to say, if you knew my place of employment you'd understand death happens down the hall from lunch. Even here where you can't push death to the margins of your mind, ten years is too long to not be laid to rest.
So I took YOU and headed into the desert peaks...for closure. Closure for who? YOU didn't care. He was a bag of dust. No family, no friends, no P.O.A. I didn't even know him. Maybe it wasn't for closure; maybe it was to acknowledge that YOU is human, was human, and that matters. Life matters. Life matters because of death.
We fear death because of this innate notion that it might really be The End. When the brain goes dark...(there is nothing to write here because...exactly, at that point there is nothing.) Terrifying! With this terror-driven motivation humans explore the world over searching for the Fountain of Youth: we birth kids, we donate to colleges so the administration will immortalize our names on buildings, we build not empires but reputations, we talk of legacy, we accumulate stuff thinking we can live on in a couch, we even freeze flesh hoping one day science will find a way to thaw us back to life. Some even talk of uploading consciousness onto a Macbook Pro!
Religion, on the other hand has called off the great exploration. It claims to possess this Fountain of Youth: the cure to death. It calls it The Afterlife. Ahhhh, yes! With an afterlife, faith reduces death to a threshold: "To be continued..." As the old Christian hymn confesses, "This world is not my home. I'm just a-passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue..." Hope! Comfort! Peace!
No! A distraction. Rumors of an afterlife only rob death of what it's trying to tell you, "You are alive!" Death constantly reminds you of the reality of non-existence. The opposite of life is not death, but nothing. Two million people rolling the exact same number on a 3 trillion-sided dice have the same chance as you of being born. The slimmest of chance to escape non-existence...but here you are! You exist! You win! If you quit running from what already has you, and instead peer deeply into death's nooks and crannies, if you slowly turn it so light refracts in numberless angles you might discover that death teaches you gratitude - real, genuine appreciation that changes your embrace of life.
This was my conclusion as I carried YOU to a final resting place, as I climbed up the side of the canyon, as I freed him from the box and plastic and then watched as YOU dissolved into the wind: closure happened ten years ago. This hike was a journey to gratitude.
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