eulogy for self
why we shouldn’t be afraid of death
While you were sleeping last night, your body was doing terrific and dirty work.
Last night, you experienced 50 to 70 billion tiny, quiet deaths inside of you. It is a tragic and fantastic thing about being human, this elastic mortality of ours. To live, we must die; and then do it all over again. Hippocrates called it “the falling off of the bones.” Inscribed in our DNA is a set of instructions, coaching continual cell turnover. It is our survival against natural fluctuations, or repair after damaging events. These little deaths and rebirths nudge our bodies back and forth, maintaining just enough balance to support the next nudge, blow, or kiss. It is an iterative process that dictates, on the daily, organized death and resurrection en masse. And all the while, we grow.
It starts like this — tiny cell bodies experience regulated, yet cataclysmic changes to their forms. The biochemical event triggers apocalyptic action, requiring cell death. The morphed cells raise a proverbial white flag sending intracellular signals to purposed proteins whose job is to initiate a suicidal pathway. Cue the Grim Reaper. These signals can start the cell’s morbid process, or stop it, should the cell no longer need to die.
Death, then, is initiated with change, and ends with a choice.
In the womb, we meet death before life. Parts of us die on cue when this highly synchronized process turns cells against themselves, making way for necessary changes to our human shape. It is why we have fingers and toes, instead of webbed hands and feet. Certain cells, which made up tissue in our hands and feet had to absolve to form space between the digits, creating opposable thumbs, fingers and for some, that knobby pointer toe that grows abnormally longer than your big toe.
Slender, long fingers become a sign of creativity or genius; and those with short, stubby digits are told they are strong. But really, we had no say in the matter of how our cells chose to die, and our limbs chose to grow. Only what we do with them. Our insides possess little gods and goddesses of our bodily universe, deciding the fate of one another — collaborating or revolting, isolating or metastasizing, living or dying. And on the outside, we exist. Some days, auspiciously. Other days, lothly.
The secrets that lie between cavities of spongy bone shafts, in the ink of our pupils, and across thousands of miles of nervous networks — they are our redemption. When the going gets tough, we tell ourselves, “You don’t have to go on like this.” And our cells get to work. Changing, morphing, some dying, some regenerating. Over and over and over again.
“This time,” we say, “it will be different.”
We leave our job, our spouse, our house; and move into a tiny apartment with creaky floorboards and a leaky roof. We buy a new TV and laptop, and call home to cry when all the newness is too much. We slug bags of old clothes, a gently used wedding dress and tacky knickknacks to Goodwill and buy new furniture and clothes to express the “new me.” We buy yoga mats, humidifiers and organic fruit. We massage moisturizer into our pours, we detox, pluck, wax, paint our faces and finger nails, color our hair and signal desperately to the world we are different. We are changed.
Death, then, is initiated with change, and ends with a choice.
Water collects in a bubble of lead paint above our bed and we understand it’s time to make our next move. We sleep on it, giving our body a few more hours for the metamorphosis. When we wake up, the sun is brighter, the apartment dingier. It’s February, and snowing, but the perfect day to move.
A new coffee pot and heavy-duty vacuum are just what we need; and wine glasses, and a mortar and pestle, and those fluffy towels that don’t leave a trail of linen balls on wet skin. We sleep, wake, drive, shop some more, meditate, walk, punch, pray, fuck, cry, laugh, scream; and when we are finally ready, we love.
Until we are an entirely different being. Again. Still human, but new skin, new sinuous muscles, new bone. Brand new.
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