Being and Dying

What is it you need to do before you die?
Not your favorite conversation starter, is it?

Yet, to anyone who loves life, it is a vital one. This is the time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, when I begin to contemplate the end of things. The polish of summer’s brilliant green is starting to dull; the yellows, reds and browns are creeping into the landscape; the sunshine is almost painfully sad.

I want to sit, more often lay in the sun, being so very still that I can hear every leaf move, every bird chirp, every bug walking by. I can hardly move. I don’t want to move. I just want to lay there absorbing the sun, simply being.

The sun, at other times of year, is not like this, being somehow bright and sad at the same time. All manner of things are dying, their very essence becoming more palpable, more present, as each begins to shed whatever lies between them and their death. It seems equally true of people as they recognize their dying, they begin to offer you their pith, condensed like diamonds from the center of the earth, their very essence beginning to shine.

Bearing witness to the beautiful tension of life on its own edge, I find myself bearing witness to my own need, my own desire, my own wish to be and do in this body. While others bearing witness to me still matters, bearing witness to myself feels precious and demanding. How much of my individual path is proscribed by my relationship with the collective? How much is my own trajectory?

As I delve into these questions, I begin to experience a flow, something like the hum of being on a plane at the moment of departure, the excitement of venturing out marked by both the feeling of movement and a sense of stillness, some unknown space that comes between them. Is this sensation like the moment between life and death, I wonder?

I wouldn’t actually know since clearly I haven’t actually died yet, at least not in this particular body. But I have born witness to the death of many others; friends, family, dogs, birds. I have had the good fortune to be with a friend through her life and death. The experience was a remarkable teaching — sitting with her as she willed herself to complete her life’s work, as she struggled to breathe and being with her in silence after her death. Such an experience remains an ineffable transcendent gift.

Dying happens. It happens all the time. Sometimes we bring death upon us, sometimes we happen upon it, and it almost always takes us by surprise. Truthfully, I am grateful that something can still take me by surprise. Too often, I am caught up in the whirl of life, the pressing of occupation, of doing and creating, and then somehow, a surprise, mercifully slows things down, softening them and bringing me back to being. In that moment of shock, I can see clearly what arises, what is important, re-orienting again to this moment.

The experiences of actual death that I have witnessed remain deeply with me but not in a haunting or sad way. Most often they feel comforting, even bolstering, as I roll them around in my heart like you would the taste of something very complex and very nourishing in your mouth. They gently bring me to what I am actually doing in my life. Or more precisely what am I being in my life, what I might wish to be, hope to be, or need to be.

I cannot know when I will die. No matter how many people I read about in the newspaper, or how many people I know who have died, I still cannot know when I will die. There are, of course, always those little deaths — — the death of objects or ideas or even relationships, but the death of this body, this most precious body, is knowledge I have no access to. I can, however, continue to mine my being for those things that I need to do before I die, finding the things that feel sticky, nagging, and painful. If I do these things that I need to do, I know they will graduate me from the past, seeding a fresh start before the opportunity disappears.

The things I wish to do before I die, these things demand a new life from me. Their potential manifestation actually provokes the other kind of death — the death of ideas about what is or is not possible. In this year where there has been so much actual death, it strikes me as essential to cultivate this other kind of death, allowing worn-out ideas about ways and means to lose their grip and to give way to new ideas, new life birthed from a ground fertile with possibility, hope and inspiration.

So, now, I have to ask, what can I compost, what can I bring to death so that life is born anew in me?

I bring my fear to the compost pile. I bring my love, too, my presence that burns away all that lies between me and life itself. This, then, is how I would know death.