Death and Sky

That monk who noticed the kinship between Death and Sky?

He died!

It's not very spectacular, I suppose. He was old. But his pronouncement had very much affected me and now his death does the same.

When I was a child, Death was the raw and strange experience of others' communal grief. I remember when my uncle died of a massive heart attack in what I now know was his early 50s. (He was must my uncle then, and not a man who could in any way be 'in his early 50s'.) The funeral was a lot like church, except we had to dress up even more, everyone was crying and there was a box up front with Uncle Charlie in it. And there were more flowers. Lots of flowers. Big, fake looking flowers with little notes attached.

Afterwards we went to my grandmother's house and it was like Thanksgiving but with more people. There was a potluck. And pictures of Uncle Charlie. And we all had to sit still until Mom finally told us we could go play.

Later Death became a philosophical question - a serious one, one that certainly had implications for the here and now, but one without an internal reality much different than that silly question "What is Truth?".

To be or not to be. What dreams may come? Be not proud. Memento mori. Not without hope. The doorway to the absurd. Freedom from order. The final enemy to be defeated.

I wrestled with Death then and would not let go, looking perhaps, like Jacob, for a blessing. But none came.

The death of my mother taught me something new - Death as permanent absence. Death as the loss of a self from the universal. Death as a violent tear in the fabric of human relationships. And as this view of death sank in and came to rest, towards the end of my wanderings, I came to know my own death in similar terms - my death as my own future departure from the entire network of relationships - even out here in Ithilien - that I know to be my life.

Knowing this, maybe I even came out here to die.

But now, in the passing of this old monk who seems to have seen his own reflection in the sky and called out Death! ... I have the scent of something new.

Something beyond loss.

Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa passes through my mind.

There will be a funeral at St. Godric's this evening.

Midway through my life's journey I go down expectantly.