Death, or Heaven's River

 

"All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.  Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?"  So I saw that there is nothing better for a man than to enjoy his work, because that is his lot. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him?  - The Teacher

Been thinking a bit about death.

Recently, I had a person close to my family pass away very unexpectedly.  Though I didnt know him as well as I do alot of my family members, he was one of the first people even remotely close to me to pass away and the suddenness of his death really caught me off guard.  To quote Calvin and Hobbes, you always imagine these sort of things happening to someone else, but you're someone else to everybody else.

I remember in high school when shootings would happen in other high schools or in our hometown, theres was always an atmosphere of uncertainty hanging about everyone's head for the next week.  Among the feverish pace of carefree high school life, suddenly everyone was faced with the proposition of death.  Its a frightening idea, but such a natural one at the same time.  In such an affluent society, its interesting to see how we react to death.  We've spent millions of dollars to find ways to soften it, delay it, or even try to stop it; anything but face the actual reality.  When we have taken away hunger, disease, and all the usual killers, we end up just waiting for the inevitable grip of old age, kind of like rats that race through a maze only to find out they've hit a dead end and there was never a way out to begin with.  When we have erased everything avoidable, all were left with is the inevitable

Particularly with American culture I think the thing that scares us the most is that death is something we have no control over.  Because we've over used words like "liberty" or "freedom" we dont like to be forced into anything we dont want to be doing (similar to how we deal with pain).  We're just a good ol culture of control freaks.

Worst of all, like The Teacher says, death is something you can only experience once.  No one will come back from the grave, dust off their shoulders, and say "well, that wasnt so bad."  I struggle with uncertainty alot, but I wonder if that is how death is just supposed to be.  Its the great equalizer of all mankind.  As a Hebrew king once said, "As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals." Yet, our ways of dealing with death can make all the difference.  I have heard many people in my life talk about how they had no fear of death (including one family friend that resented being resuscitated at the end of her life) and I've heard others that are absolutely terrified of death.  For some, it is the end; for others a beginning.

In South America, the ancient Incas believed that when people died they became stars in the sky.  They called the milky way Mayu, which in Quechua translates roughly as "Heaven's River."  Essentially, the Incas thought that death was the simple crossing over to a new existence, as natural as crossing a river to a new home.  I really like this idea.  Though we all live in uncertainty, not knowing whether we could very well die tomorrow, Death at the same time is a beautiful thing: an undiscovered country, perhaps the border between finite and infinite.  I wonder if the Incas looked up at the sky in amazement, wondering what was lying beyond the stretch of starry blackness over head.

For now, there isnt much to do.  maybe I'll try living before I cross the river.

~Jared