Just Outside the Fire Circle
World Health Organization officials expressed disappointment recently at the group’s finding that, despite the enormous efforts of doctors, rescue workers and other medical professionals worldwide, the global death rate remains constant at one hundred percent.
Death, a metabolic affliction causing total shutdown of all life functions, has long been considered humanity’s number one health concern. Responsible for one hundred percent of all recorded fatalities worldwide, the condition has no cure.
The WHO Director said “Unfortunately, it would appear that the death rate remains constant and total, as it has inviolably since the dawn of time.”
OK, so it’s from The Onion, but still true nonetheless. While there is a “positive death” movement out there, intending to promote a more open discussion about the endgame, how much attention should be given to it?
What I know is that when I don’t know what to say, when the Grat has left the Dude, I often just begin with “Thank you for another day never promised to me.” It isn’t my birthright. There are no guarantees for any one, except for that one hundred percent certainty.
I was getting more coffee just now, thinking about the date and what was on my mind. The sixth was familiar, I couldn’t think why. I typed in “Hiroshima” and, sure enough, that’s the day the bomb fell seventy years ago. Nagasaki on the ninth. I looked online and, of course, there is a wealth of articles today concerned with such an historic event. One source said the two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only uses of nuclear weapons in armed conflict.
What are we supposed to do with a number like that? Those are people, but it occurs like an abstraction, just like the piled up bodies of US servicemen on Iwo Jima or Guadalcanal. Those were the bodies upon which victory in the Pacific was predicated. Same with all the bodies in Beirut, after the recent explosion. Same with 160, 000 American COVID deaths. Unless you know someone who died in any of these situations, it’s just hard to get your arms around it.
There is an opportunity here.
I read in The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker, about a woman’s morning ritual. “Every day she does a ‘death meditation,’ in which she imagines she has died, sees all the people she loves and all she’s left behind in this world, and just hovers over the scene, watching. She then wiggles her fingers and toes and comes back, deeply grateful to be alive, perhaps a little more aware of what she values. It turned out that, for her, part of having and savoring a good life was keeping aware of death. She then raised her glass and toasted something like ‘To death!,’ signaling she was done. ‘To death!’ we replied, glasses in the air.”
Thanks be for another day above ground, even with the uncountable days of eternity and non being just outside this convivial campfire circle, like wild and hungry and carnivorous eyes in the dark. My days of light. And life. Gone like smoke or yesterday morning’s fog or summer in New England. My brief time in the circle, with warm light showing me all the other faces and its orange snapping and hissing and smoking. This is my brief shot and then there’s all of eternity without me.
Rumi wrote–
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
