My uncle died six months ago of a gall bladder crisis - a nail stuck to medicine. He was well, very active, working and living normally. It was all of a sudden.
When someone important to you dies, many people come to tell their stories of similiar experiences. One of these reports I find particularly significant:
I am sorry for the death of your uncle, so, so sudden!
The person followed in the attempt of solace
My father died early too. But he had cancer for several years and we had time to prepare for his death. Already so, so suddenly... I understand that it is difficult. My feelings.
At the funeral, I discovered that my uncle had a very large circle of friends. I overhead a few sentences, and they repeated themselves. Only the disease changed. The part "we were able to prepare ourselves, because so-and-so had been sick for some time" drew my attention. After all, what prevents a person from preparing for the death of their friends and family even if none of them are diagnosed with a serious illness?
It seems that those who are not sick are eternal.
It is a madness, but we live as if the disease were a virus that ends the life that, until then, was eternal. We lonly think of the end of life if we recieve the diagnosis that our death or the death of a loved one is near. Our mind has a such a short temporal range that, in general, it can barely reason beyond twenty years. If death is beyond twenty years, it is as if it does not even exist.
But the fact is that we can not even guarantee that it will not arrive in the next twenty minutes!
I think a good doctor should give the most useful of diagnoses to all his patients. Imagine your cardiologist saying:
Your days are numbered. You have at most another 60 years of life. That is if you are very lucky.
Who knows, so we would dare to take a look at the much-feared death without the need to have a cancer for it.
"Death is natural", we might think. "When I have to die, I'm going to die, there's nothing to do, I do not have to think about it and sadden my life".
Our mind is likely to come with this speech. But one of the most useful things I've learned in life is that the pitches of our mind are unreliable and extremely random. So I better turn to people whose minds have a more reliable base of operation than mine. And with that, try to develop the same basis to have more interesting and useful ideas. So it is not smart to put the thought of death under the rug just because your mind suggested.
I had the opportunity to have a good doctor who gave me the diagnosis mentioned above. He warned me, explained the disease and recommended daily treatments for contemplation of death as a treatment. I began to examine the fact that my days and those of my father, my mother, my brother, my friends, my work colleagues were all numbered. They are finite. They will finish. They will disappear from the map.
Puf!
So many times I avoided these thoughts... I imagined that it could attract death. Sometimes I concluded that thinking about her would not solve anything. But I decided to trust the doctor: with some discipline, I followed his guidelines on the doses of death observation.
Behold, something has changed. My daily life was lighter. Some co-worker was freaking out and, miraculously, I was not so upset anymore. Someone was closing me in the traffic, and I was giving the ticket - no horn. All this because I came to observe for a few minutes the fact that my days and the days of all are numbered. The regular contemplation of this inexorable truth weakens the seriousness we give to things and gives us a more compassionate and open look at the world and people.
(Needless to say, at time I forget all of this and I find myself wishing for things that are not very auspicious for people. Fortunately, those moments have diminished.)
Behold, one of these days, my uncle dies. Suddenly. Just as I had been contemplating! No news! The fact of this imagined reality not being something completely new helped me a lot. The fact that I have dealt with these issues before has been and has been very helpful. It is obvious that his death was a very intense experience and that I gave in to tears in many moments. However, I was able to maintain some stability of mind, body and energy, and to help those around me. Remember: stability has nothing to do with coldness and lack of love; In fact, quite the opposite.
When someone so near dies, it is intensely wide open that people die! The phrase is not so redundant, because we live as if death did not exist literally. It is as if we need to see to believe, which is extremely limited. Although death is so obvious, we ignore it all the time.
It is amazing that what has always been inplacable can cause so much confusion and despair when it presents itself: it is as if we are caught unawares about something we have always know beforehand.
We know that death exists. "Knowing" is not enough to change our posture in life. We continue with random and careless actions around the world, even though we are aware that at any moment our body can collapse. This is another extremely useful thing I have learned in life: what the mind knows will not necessarily be know by the heart (and vice versa). In other words, what is obvious to the mind through reasoning is not so obvious to the emotions and to the heart. It's one thing to know the recipe for the cake; It's another thing to eat the cake. Therefore, in treating death as a simply natural and common event, we are acting superficially, for we do not include in the analysis how much this process touches us at the moment when it actually appears.
No matter how much I miss my uncle now; however great my love and affection for him, I carry the process of his death in my heart. It was like having received a very high teaching straight into the bloodstream, such as its intensity. With his many virtues and faults, my uncle has taught me so many other things, but this final teaching of his death has had the power to make my life more compassionate, light and meaningful despite the longing that remains. Consciously, I remember his death whenever I can and I look at it more and more willingly. I'm sorry when I'm too busy with other nonsense, and I do not have time to take a closer look at these issues.
The death seen from the front has the power to implode the "little things" that we feed with somebody, the hallucinations about relationships, money, disagreements and other bullshits of life. When we realize with our guts that we are all dying, we reorganize our priorities.
I decided to share this with you to remember that we are forgotten. That we forget really important things that contribute to our true happiness. With another great doctor, I learned that "all we have to do is remember". The more we remember death, the less we will forget that it is not worth investing energy in narrow things. Keeping a broader view, our lives makes sense and color, even if externally everything stays the same: you continue in the same job, in the same apartment, with the same girlfriend, but, deep down, everything is different. internally, everything has changed.
