Death is over-rated: so big deal! I am going to die. Yes, with my basically primate brain, I am not well equipped to imagine myself in quite a different state, a much more inert existence if the models and examples are followed. George Alpert, who morphed into Ram Dass, wrote that dying is like selling the old Ford and getting a new car. Since neither of us has died and since individual results will vary, we are going by our hunches, as we do with most things, especially events in the future. I cannot report personally on the experience of dying nor that of being dead. But my mother and my daughter have died. Both have been dead for several years. We have some of the ashes of both in our house. The ashes are still in the containers and look the same, unchanged. I just checked on them. So still, so inert, so apparently stable.
When my sister and I made arrangements for my mother's body after death, the funeral home asked us to sign a form to have her cremated as she wished. It had a number of explicit statements we were to acknowledge. The first one was something to the effect that we understood that the process of cremation was irreversible. Once reduced to ash, her body could not be returned to its former state. But that is the distinguishing characteristic of death itself. Once solidly dead, we are not alive and we are permanently not going to be.
As biological creatures, we are programmed to resist death, to struggle onward in an attempt to remain alive. However, as thinking beings, we can examine our attitudes and expectations. We can notice if the thought of death is given too much prominence. We can see that our predecessors include very large numbers of people who have gone through the death experience. We expect to do so ourselves. I say let's try to enjoy the opportunities we currently have and not get too excited about the period when we are in a different format than our current one.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
