Life Death Life

When a person who has always been there, suddenly isn't. The world seemed safe and solid, and as though it had always been what it is; now feels like paper castles. What I want to know about death is? Is what is the point? I mean, it does make it rather pointless, doesn't it? People just getting born and then dying all over the place?

I mean, I don't believe all that stuff about resurrection, because people rot don't they? When you bury them? And it seems if they, just keep on dying, millions of them, well that's it. What's the point of being alive in the first place? Of course, it's right we die. When we die we rot and that's the end of it. I have never had any doubts of that. And yet, it's an odd thing, but not the romantic opinion about the departing soul that is shaken in the presence of death. It is the rational belief in mortality that is shattered. I do remember that quiet clearly once I've seen death. One would believe, it was slowing ones own pulse, I cannot recall anything I thought or felt, except appalling stillness.

I did it too late, had I expected it to be on time? I don't know. Traveling to death would always be undiscovered country, from which no traveler returns unchanged. I have never forgotten how it dislocated my certainty, the survival of the soul is a commonplace deduction from a sight of a human dead body. In the presence of death it is mortality that seems preposterous. I am still puzzled by that, still awestruck, who could believe in souls?

I am a foolish woman. Yes, I am a fool, but a nice fool. I can feel how the absence seemed not only absolute, but irrevocable. It is just mystery, like everything else. First we grow up and have worries, and then we die and I don't see the point. We all die, but first we all lived. Maybe I should not worry about the point. Just take my share, take it two-handedly and in full measure. Leave my mark to my loved ones. There are so many reasons, whatever brute or blackguard, or random chance made the world, was surely a marvelous conjurer.

Fish to eat, fresh from the salt sea, with sweet berries from the thorns. I shall see every day if I just open my eyes to the hills, the movements of the wind and water, and the fall of the light. There are never two moments the same, what with the sky and weather and tide, the passage of time and the random fall of the rain.

To be alive is to be bodily present, to notice where and when one is. Here we are like amateur actors on some magnificent stage, dwarfed by the cosmic grandeur of our setting, muffing our lines, but producing now and then, a fitful gleam of our own, an act of mortal beauty. The lifeboat in the storm, the beauty of life.