I’ve been thinking lately a lot about death. I don’t mean that in a depressing way at all. I don’t mean to say that I am lying there each night, wishing for my pitiful existence to end, whilst the rain falls hard outside. Even as I sit here, through my blinds I can see two young blonde children laughing and running in their backyard—and I am thankful for life. But duplicity is inherent in existence, and I cannot live without dying. So, I am thinking of death.
I think, too, of blood and pain and destruction. Moreso, the self-destruction a soul attempts when it views itself as past its best. I have cut myself every night for a week. I play tic-tac-toe across my thigh, and sometimes, I draw pictures with my mother’s fabric blade. But believe me, I don’t do this because I view my flesh as imperfect—though I do indeed view myself as something less than good enough, that is not why I cut. No, I cut for the sting of blood and the reminder that my flesh is substantial matter. I cut to remind myself of the layers of skin and blood and muscle and tendon; for when I am at my lowest, everything seems to feel of a dream. Everything seems to feel unreal, and I am not sure of my purpose or place. But when I cut, the sting is localised, and I can watch my very lifeforce prove its existence. I feel most alive then.
But for all my reasoning that I do not cut to die, I cannot help but wonder about death. I wonder about the ways in which one can die. Shall I end my existence with my own hand and fourteen white pills? Or would it be a silver blade across the wrist, dying before I get old to save me that pain? Will it be quick as a flash, a car accident hurtling into a wall, or will it be a slow, cancerous, painful death, allowing me to say my goodbyes? I would like, simply, to fall asleep when I am very old and not wake up again. My husband would wake up and find my corpse; and he would not be sad, he would not be distraught, because he would know it was the least painful way to go—the way I wanted to go. I think of all these endings, but I look at them as a beginning.
I hope beyond all reason that when my heart does stop beating, and my lungs stop breathing, and my neurons stop firing, that I do not just become a remembered name and compost in the ground. I do believe that I lose all physical form when I die; that my soul and everything that makes me who I am flees my physical flesh. I do believe that when they cremate me, I will disintegrate, and I believe that I will be scattered into the Pacific Ocean. I do believe that the moment my body functions cease, my body becomes nothing more than carbon.
But I cannot, will not believe that my soul ends there. I believe that we are made up of everything around us; everything in the past, and every potentiality in the future. I believe that are souls are made up of inherent wisdoms learnt in ages gone by, and we have remembered them within our subconscious. And when we die, when our soul splits from flesh and we become incorporeal, I believe with everything I am that we will reach understanding. Transcendence, where we become above the world and can view everything.
For life is too painful, too chaotic, too unpredictable for there not to be a governing truth. I don’t know if it is a god, or more than one god, or science, but whatever it is, I will one day understand. And that’s all I can ask for. That as I cut on earth to remind myself that my flesh still breathes, I move ever forward to a day when I am full of the universe.
