The End

The End

Originally shared by Alvin Stearns

Every human story ultimately ends with, "Then s/he died.

The personal ending has been on my mind since about age 11. The age when I understood not just the fact of death, but its universality.

Not long after that realization I learned that the dead have a kind of afterlife, though not the ones taught to me in years of Southern Baptist Sunday School.

We mythologize the dead. The perfect mother. The world's greatest dad. The brother who had courage and talent and such possibilities. We tend to idealize the (safely) dead, refining their history down to those parts we consider most essential to their memory, to serve the living. A few we vilify, the bogeymen among the (thankfully) dead, like Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot.

None of them ever come back. Our dead. Unless you believe in reincarnation or ghosts, which are other forms of mythologizing the dead to serve a need among some of the living.

We all die. A common ending to our common human story.

We don't come back.

Have you ever considered the choices you're making--today, right now--balanced against the universal and inevitable truth? It might make a difference.

How you love. Choosing to love, including yourself, flaws and all.

Relaxing a bit, maybe deciding that the wars you've been fighting don't mean that much after all. Maybe it's more admirable and certainly more purposeful to enjoy today, to create a field where enjoyment is possible.

Speaking out against wrongs, because though Hitler is dead we've got ample proof of what we're capable of when the living don't act to counterbalance voices racing us toward suffering and needless death.

Lost my train of thought . . .

The X-Files is currently in production for six episodes to air next January. It makes me happy to think about it, having that to look forward to in the cold and dark of another Northern New England winter.

In The X-Files episode "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" a middle-aged psychic had the dubious gift of being able to know the time and circumstances of people's deaths. Scully impulsively asks him, "OK. How do I die." The man smiles and replies, "You don't." He later commits an act of self sacrifice that changes the future, saving Mulder.

Each day we change the future. Not the fact of that one ultimate and inevitable and universal truth--we are not Dana Scully. But, we do create. Ourselves. Our relationships. Our home. Our world.

Don't worry about the inevitable.

In fact, why worry at all?

What will you be and do today? You have today, after all.

//

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