Subject #19: On death

There is a story about one master who always sent his new disciples into funerals. For thirty days disciples had to sit and watch dead people being burnt and cremated. Every day they would watch silently people’s bodies turning into ashes. What was the point of that? Even though we all know that we are going to die someday, we still don’t truly understand the impermanence of all things (life included). Even more exact description might be that we don’t want to understand impermanance. And still as it was said in movie Matrix:

Everything that has a beginning, has an end.

We spend huge deal of time thinking about life and all things related, except death. How often does one think that ”this may be the last day, last moment of my life”? It may be but we never want to acknowledge that, we always live in a strong belief that there will be a tomorrow. Idea of tomorrow makes us move our plans, our dreams into distant future. That usually leads into situation where one chooses not to be happy right now - only in the future when one gets/achieves something.

The whole idea of death scares us and we avoid thinking about it. We fear death so much that we have tried to fight against it by making up such concepts as afterlife and reincarnation. They are used to comfort the mind, to give courage in facing the inevitable death. What about concept of soul? Isn’t there anything in us that is immortal? I would say that in a way there is something immortal but it is not what is usually understood when talking about soul. It is something that existed before us and that will exist after us – sometimes we were part of that and in that sense we were timeless too.

So why do we fear death? Isn’t that fear only a desire to preserve whatever one ”has” in life forever? We also wonder what will people think about us when we’re dead. Will they grieve us? (usually we even wish that, which is pretty crazy). Funerals are considered as very unpleasant event, not only because of ceremonies, rules of conduct and dress code but also because funerals remind us from our mortality. People are never mourning on behalf of the dead person, they are mourning because they’re feeling a loss in their own life. When I die, I surely hope that people, at least for once, would break free from all that. That they would put aside their ego’s tendency to cry and instead laugh, because they’re still here. There is a an old saying which fits into theme perfectly:

Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.