Sunday 18 August 2013

THERE'S NO WAY AROUND IT. THE BODY IS MADE TO PERISH

This is the corollary to loving one's body. Absolutely and unreservedly, love it. It is our lovely animal, so mysterious that not another like it exists in all the trillion universes. Nourish, nurture, adore it. But know it is temporary. Again and again I come up against the immutable, ineluctable fact of death, staring at us all the time, and which we so blindly (isn't this the greatest of our blindnesses?) forget.

The only reason I remember and write about it so often is that before Donald's death I had had, except for the death of pets --no less traumatic -- no experience of human death, though a consciousness of  it existed from the second I was born. My grand niece, Ajuni, 6 now, had said to me at 2: I don't want to die. I don't want mama to die. When I was about three I saw a child's coffin in the bazaars of Secunderabad, and I am told I threw a fit, rolled on the street and screamed because my parents wouldn't buy one for me. I wanted it to sleep in, which reminds me that Edith Piaff used to sleep in one. What a wonderful thing before one went to sleep, that other state of unconsciousness, to remember the Great Sleep, and welcome it! That is how I want to die: not raging, raging "against the dying of the light," as Dylan Thomas did, or shaking my fist at God as thunder and lightening tore the sky, as Beethoven did, but opening my arms wide to it, and embracing it in an embrace that can only happen when Body is absent.

Bah, Humbug! I say this now, but who knows what I will feel when it is upon me? I will be too much in the clutches of suffering to turn to it as to a lover, passionately; or I will decide at the last minute to rage against it. It is a testimonial to the value of life that we are always reluctant to leave it. This, too, is an ineluctable fact.

 

2 comments:

  1. I have a personal death myth. Who knows if I will be allowed to put it into being.

    The plan is to die alone in a wilderness. To walk off like an old native American or Eskimo. For years I thought that the escarpment over looking the Laguna Salada in Baja California would be the perfect place.

    Now that I live in the Philippines the place is the ocean. When asked a few years ago by a good friend what my plan was I replied, "I am going to go south. I am going to live on the beach. I am going to build boats. I am going sailing. I am going to die at sea."

    So far I am too busy building boats to sail much but the plan is still very much in place.

    Robert La Quey
    https://www.facebook.com/TropicalBoats

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  2. My friend, Indi Rana, who eventually died of breast cancer in a hospital, had this myth of suicide. she would go out to sea in a plugged in leaky boat, remove the plug and shoot herself. The boat would sink, and her body with it. I think it is important to have death myths, and prepare for them (though not by suicide! I think life is eminently worth living), and hope one dies the way one wishes to while knowing fully that life and death have a way of doing their own thing without our wishes.

    I dedicate this post to you, dear Bob, who saw me through some painful moments during those days twenty years ago. And I still remember the day you took me sailing on the Pacific.

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