Learning, and Living

AMONG THE MOST unpleasant aspects of living a life as a human being on a tiny planet at the edge of a nondescript galaxy is living long enough to witness the death of not only your elders, but your age peers as well, and even people younger than you. That, and all the other slings and arrows, well documented. I learned about death at the tender age of five, when my maternal step grandfather "passed" as we say. Why my mother, a woman who firmly believed that that the best time to learn all about real life is right now, decided to take me with her to "visitation" at the mortuary is still unknown to me; either she thought the best time to encounter and deal with death is right now, or, she couldn't find or wouldn't take the time to find a baby sitter.I still wish she had found one. The image of my grandfather in his casket still stays with me, probably because it was formed at such an eary age, and was so deply impactufl upon my unformed mind. Long ago a friend of mine remarked that people seem to beautiful to die. Maybe, but without limited life spans and mortality, exactly how "beautiful" would we all seem to each other, is a topic which invites deep thought, and can engender unexpected gratitude. Merely glancing around at the known universe is sufficient to instill within us a sense of our relative smallness; whenever one of the people closest to us passes away, the sense is reinforced. I don't think I'd ever take a six year old for a viewing of an open casket, but, well, maybe that's just me. I do this; maybe most or all older people do: whenever somebody younger than I dies, I reflect back to what I was doing when I was his or her age, and imagine what it would have been like, how things, especially my life, would have been different, had I died at that point in my life. Such musings are more than ample to reignite the most soured appreciation for life. I like to think that my mind is nearly as open to learning as it was all those decades ago, a thought which boils down to no more than a wishful fantasy. It freaks me out, as we say, that the young lady who was the director of our local senior center as the tender age of forty three passed away three days or so ago, of stomach cancer. Maybe we learn more about ourselves through our reactions to the misfortunes and deaths of others. With all this, with individual and societal death always close by in the immediate bacground. We are tod and so we believe that humans are the only animals aware of their own mortality, who even give the matter a first or second thought. Maybe that is our curse, maybe, our blessing. But an living organism unable to comprehend its own mortality is also undoubtedly unable to comprehend a great deal more, more than any normal, halfway curious, intelligent person would want to miss My experience is that dealing with death does indeed become "easier" with experience, but not easier enough to make it worthwhile. or desirable Still,we now that we don't want to live forever, at least not in our current inarnation. I think my plan would be to reincarnate my essense time and again in various shapes and forms of life, perhpas on different planets in different parts of the universe. And maybe, just maybe, take a little bit of whatever I might learn each lifetime forward with me into the next lifetime. Or maybe we are all "gifted" one lifetime per universe. With every subsequent cyclical big bang, we, as individuals, emerge and live again, in one form or another. It may be that we our living our nine billionth lifetime, to borrow a number from Arthur C. Clarke. In this context, I hope and plan to see my friend Ashley again.