I carried my Grandma’s coffin today. Not on my own of course. She had a wicker coffin, something I’ve only seen in a trendy death section of a lifestyle magazine.
Naturally, being so close to death makes you think about your own mortality. I was literally carrying the weight of it on my shoulders. The full, overbearing, and unknowable weight of death. When you’re that close to it you can’t help but think about death. This is what I thought.
I expect a lot of you are like me. You avoid it. Yeah, you might talk about it in a distant kind of way, like ‘did you hear about so-and-so who died last week’ - but your death, I expect you avoid talking about that. Because who wants to talk about the inevitable?
Thinking about it can sometimes take me into these panicky black voids of thought where there’s nothing, literally nothing - and there is nothing I can do to escape it either. Dark eh?
But we should face it. Because it will happen you know? Yes, to you. It is the one thing I can predict about you, but how is something so predictable, so unknowable? The real question is - who cares?
Coming to an amicable agreement with death is essential, I thought. At some point in the future, it will come for you, and that knowledge should be liberating. Accepting the inevitability of death allows you to get on with the business of living. Death is the ultimate excuse to live life to the fullest because, without it, life has no meaning.
We pour through life as if death is something that happens to other people, cracking on, head down, getting shit done. It would be overly simplistic to say we do this to distract ourselves from death, but there is an element of that.
Next time you’re doing something and you’re bored or you’re doing something you really hate doing, tell yourself ‘I’m going to die’. You’ll quickly determine what has value and what doesn’t, and although life and commitments can get in the way of dropping it all and fucking off, having a more positive and accepting relationship with death rather than fearing it will point you in the right direction to living a more full life.
Without life there is no death, without death, there is no life.
Mostly though, I thought, I’m going to really miss my Grandma. X