—From CB—

It’s important.

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It deserves being capitalized, since it always involves proper names.

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Being 80 years old, it becomes real, even though I can’t conceive it. It’s hard to think about not being. I can only recall my mid-afternoon Ph.D. seminar on Hegel, which was likely on a Tuesday.

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I have no concept of an afterlife. The Egyptian Book of the Dead gives you formulas to turn it into a luxury cruise, but I’d need to remember my reading glasses. I can’t prove that there isn’t an afterlife, but I don’t depend on it. The most useful concept, to me, is that the state of your mind in its last years will be what you carry forever: that at least gives us a paradigm for trying, at long last, to make ourselves into decent human beings.

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My greatest worry is leaving a mess behind. I have recurring dreams of packing up crap in the van, and it never ends.

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Everything that can be said about death has been said, mostly by people who aren’t currently dying. Not a soul actually writes from experience. It’s like reading a travelogue about France by someone who’s never been there.

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The last days are a total crapshoot. I had a friend who received his diagnosis, arranged for hospice care, made his rounds of final visits while he could, approached the end with mindfulness, even a glow as we last saw him, and died a perfectly hideous death. No telling.

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Death clears the playing field. Granted, we’d prefer it just happen to bad guys. But that’s what movies are for.

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On the days I walk home from the gym, I walk through a cemetery. Some families regularly decorate their plots with flowers, whirligigs, maybe a plastic Smurf. On a flag day, there’s an outcrop of little flags. Sometimes a blue heron is seen parading in the grass, oblivious to whom he’s honoring with his tread. I like the heron.

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I would prefer cremation, despite its expenditure of fossil fuels, then the family dividing the ashes in small pots, with the rest tossed somewhere, though that requires caution. There are regulations, and I wouldn’t like to be a scoff-law, however deceased. And there can be surprises. A friend tried to fulfill her mother’s wishes to be cast into the sea; at the first fling, the ashes blew back in her face.

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Burial is okay, but only where people stay living where they were born. My dad is buried in Brownsville TX, my mom in Harlan IA. As I live in CA, and I doubt I’ll take a trip to either place any time soon.

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For a play, a cow’s skull was needed. A friend took on the responsibility, went to a slaughterhouse and obtained a head. She then had to boil it clean. More easily imagined than achieved.

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Knowing the fact of death instills diverse ambitions. Am I impelled to write in hopes of surviving post-mortem? Does the billionaire strive to make billions in hopes of immortality? Does the saint embrace the leper to earn a merit badge? Fame fades fast, but it has the utility of feeding our illusions.

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I’ve seen Kafka’s THE TRIAL dramatized as a story about political despotism. For me, it’s a story about the “injustice” of death. Perhaps it would be clearer if Josef K were played by a five-year-old who’s summoned to court and convicted of mortality. “I didn’t do it!” he cries.

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The whole deal sucks.

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The earworm running through my head in the minutes of writing this: “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout…” I looked up the full lyrics, since it’s been a long time. Gets much grosser and ends with “And your eyes fall out and your teeth decay, and that is the end of a perfect day.”

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I’m eighty.

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