Musings on Mortality

Another Saturday, another article. I'm listening to Beethoven's Pastoral Sonata while typing these words here in my bedroom, shielded by curtains from the harsh afternoon sunlight. I was just wondering last night what I am supposed to write today. And because this week I lost another good friend to the Covid-19 virus, I decided to write about mortality.

My late friend, who was a colleague of mine during my time in Indonesia had passed away last Friday, leaving behind 3 children and a wife. It was a shock to me when I heard the news, rather belatedly on Tuesday. He was a devout Christian and a clean-living person whom I respected very much. His death was totally unexpected and tragic to everyone. I guess it made all of us reflect on our own mortality. Any one of us could be whisked away by the Grim Reaper anytime.

We live knowing that we will all die one day. Sometimes when I'm in large glamorous gatherings of people, I morbidly imagine how in probably just another few decades, all the strong, healthy and beautiful people that I see around me will be nothing more than ash and bones--their ravishing smiles and laughter probably surviving as pixels on some storage in the cloud, unremembered and unsighted.

Like these sentences of mine too: mere arrangements of bits and bytes in some cloud storage, insignificant and unremarkable, perhaps even permanently wiped out--succumbing ultimately to the laws of entropy. 

We as humans will never come to terms with death. We have to find solace in religion, which do not always provide us with satisfactory answers. But having some answer is better than none, for death seems so final--the annihilation of everything dear to us: separation from our loved ones and all the things we are so attached to in this world. We think that each one of our individual existence is or is supposed to have unique significance across space and time. And we, our unique visions, hopes, feelings and dreams and physical bodies deserve perpetuation and preservation.

But let's pause for a moment and think. Yes think--such a human activity: having thoughts and emotions, a mind and free will, a soul, if you will. What if all this is but a small fragment of a larger existence? This is where words become inadequate to express this larger vista of being, for language is a human construct that arose out of our very limited spectrum of experience--this bio-chemical machine of protein and water, with electro-chemical energy coursing through a nexus of neurons, which we proudly interpret as a life of thoughts and emotions.

 After finishing writing the few lines of the previous paragraph, I dozed off for a while--having lacked enough sleep for the entire work week. And for those few moments--wasn't that no different from death itself? Did I care when I was sleeping? If I had not woke up from the slumber, I would have been 'contented' being 'dead' for I did not know better. But now that I'm 'alive' again, I want to cling on to this consciousness that is capable of writing these words that you are reading now, forever.

When we are dead, will we be disappointed at our unwelcome demise? That consciousness that we experience now, will it still even exist or matter? If it does, will it still have the same petty concerns as we do now? 

Perhaps not. Perhaps death is a process of outgrowing our present state of immaturity, which we call adulthood, like how we leave behind the innocent attachments of our childhood. Yes, we smile at how we used to care so much about our toys and ice-cream not knowing that real adult life offers a lot more than that.

Perhaps death is an awakening from the pupae of our adult life? Our consciousness suddenly becoming aware that we are resplendent butterflies, able to flap our magical wings to fly away and dance in an air filled with pollen and perfumed petals? We'll never know until we experience it. And at the moment, that's how I would like to imagine the lives that my departed friends are having. Something a butterfly can never communicate with a leave-crawling larva. A larva's view of mortality is all we are capable of now. And thus end my musings on mortality on a lazy Saturday afternoon, on another day in my earthly existence.