Accepting death is never easy. Facing the loss of someone we love is harder still.
Perhaps all we need to do is carry our soul to the threshold of the unknown with trust… and believe in what lies ahead. To tell ourselves that the path is built one small step at a time, even beyond this life. To create our future from the very void itself—is that not what death teaches us?
At times, I find myself thinking that if I am still alive, it may be so that one day I can die in peace. To devote one’s life to practising the art of letting it go—why not? To live wholeheartedly with those we love, while knowing that one day we will have to leave them behind. To leave behind a story, a home, a world. To depart with nothing to our name, hoping we will not have to beg our way through that inevitable passage. To leave with grace when the final bell tolls...
The task is immense; I will need a hundred years to accomplish it. And I will have to die each time one of my loved ones does. “A hundred times upon the work put back your craft,” as the saying goes. How many times have I already begun again?
My father’s death was not the first to be entered in the ledger of “losses.” Yet it proved to be a deeply instructive experience for me. Although the circumstances surrounding his passing clearly bore the imprint of the man he was, I could never have predicted how it would unfold. We may try to prepare ourselves, to seek advice, to learn all we can… but few people realize how much grace and even transcendence such an event can contain. Too often, when it comes to death, we imagine only the worst and look above all for ways to shield ourselves from it.
It was in this frame of mind that I arrived at the bedside of my dying father. Lying in a bed set up in the living room, surrounded by those he loved in the home he had built, my father listened to us with his eyes closed. Faced with his imminent death, we could think of nothing better than to hold on, with all our strength, to the living man he still was. And even as he gradually slipped away before our eyes, each of us shared a story about him. Everything he had been, everything he had given, every prank he had played came rushing back in waves of laughter. Never had life beside him felt so vivid, so full, as it did in the moment of his dying. What more could we have wished for? My father left this world a happy man.
And yet… the moment after his final breath, the world came crashing down. How easily we move from one emotion to another. In the pain of loss—and knowing that loss would visit us again and again—we somehow found the strength to rise. Some more slowly than others, some with great difficulty, as though a part of themselves had been torn away. Death is all the more painful when it claims those we love. The ones we cannot bear to let go, for fear that we ourselves will never feel whole again. For fear of coming apart. That is what is truly frightening: no longer recognizing ourselves because death has left its mark upon us.
No matter how smooth or rough the road may be, death is woven into every step we take, quietly shaping the way we exist. Whatever we do, at every moment, the end awaits us. Such is the nature of life itself: nothing is permanent. It is a difficult truth to swallow, and I have had to learn to break it into smaller pieces, taking it in little by little, so that I could keep living without being crushed beneath its weight.
Faced with the harshness of such a truth, there are also many sources of comfort. In its own way, life strives for balance: it gives as much as it takes away. And so, as I searched to understand why loss affected me so deeply, a walk through the forest led me to a dead tree. It was enormous, majestic, and must once have been beautiful. Yet even in all its grandeur, I could find no grace in its death. I continued my search, losing my way more than once, until I found myself standing before the same dead tree again. It was then that I understood I needed to linger there.
I wrapped my arms around the tree, hoping to hear whatever might explain it all. Before long, I became aware of the sound of branches knocking against one another in the wind. A few chickadees hopped about, calling back and forth to each other, darting through the air at play. Soft green moss rose from the forest floor and climbed its trunk, while clusters of mushrooms seemed to compete for a place upon it. Then a piece of bark fell gently onto me. Everything was so full of life. I remember thinking, in that moment: Does death truly exist?
From that lesson, I kept the piece of bark. It reminds me that impermanence is inseparable from change. And perhaps that is where its beauty lies: in all that moves, transforms, and carries on. Relentlessly, life weaves and reweaves the fabric of our existence—the small and great stories of passing lives. And, generation after generation, it builds the world of the living upon the legacy of those who came before.
By letting go, little by little, of all that we call our own, perhaps we eventually find a meaning in death. And perhaps we come at last to die as we are meant to live: trusting and defenseless.
By Maryse Dubé
Published in Profil - Spring 2014
Laisser un commentaire