“Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.  There was a time when we were not:  this gives us no concern – why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?  To die is only to be as we were before we were born.”

– William Hazlitt

Perspective.  I think that’s what it takes.  We know we are born, and we know that one day we will die.  This is what it means to be human, but it seems that we spend an awful lot of time trying to strike a bargain with Fate that will allow us to go on forever.  I remember a time, when I was a very small child, when such worries were not a part of my life.  I can’t tell you the exact time of the turning point, but I know that a day came when I learned that I would die.  It made me sad and afraid to think of not being here; and some of that sadness was learned from the way the adults around me reacted to the idea of dying.  I suppose the older we get, and the closer we come to a predictable time when we no longer will be a part of this life, the more we are compelled to face the reality of our own mortality.

When we are born, we are blank slates.  We are totally dependent on others for life, and our survival depends on the world around us.  As we grow and learn, we develop an ego — a sense of self — that defines us as different and separate from those around us.  As our ego grows and expands, we begin to feel as though we no longer need other people for our survival.  We become independent and able to walk alone.  We become adolescents.  I remember saying to my eldest, “Just because I call you ’son,’ you don’t need to think that the world revolves around you.”  Haven’t we all been that child?  Is there a part of us that still believes the world will end if we no longer were here to manage it?

I learned about death in an abrupt and harsh way when my son ran in front of a car and died of his injuries at the age of six.  He was still at that free-spirited age where thoughts of existence and non-existence had not yet invaded his being.  He simply lived each day — we would say, as though it were his last — but truly, he lived each day as though it were his first.  It may sound strange, but I gained perspective about the transient nature of life by walking through an ancient cemetery near my home.  It was a solemn walk I took there, and it led me up and down row after row of headstones, bleached white by many years of sunlight and weathering.  Each marked the place where another person with a meaningful existence had been laid to rest.  Some family plots had three and four tiny stones that marked the living and dying of several children during one harsh winter.  I would gasp as I realized that my own loss was not the first of its kind.  I would look at the dates on the parent’s stones and realize that they had outlived their children by many years; and I wondered how I ever would find my way through the pain and go on living as they did.

Perspective.  At the time of my abrupt encounter with death, I thought it was the worst thing that ever had or would happen to me.  In retrospect, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I can see that the outcome has been one of blessing and release.  In time, I gained the understanding that part of my grief centered around the feeling that my son had died before he’d really had the chance to live.  As I reflected on his short stay here, I began to see that he had left us before he had forgotten how to live.  I decided that the best tribute to him would be for his mother to live every day — not as though it were my last, but as though it were my first.

Our job, while we are here, is not to plan our end or worry about when it may come.  Our job is to live each day we are given as though it were a priceless gift — because it is.  We will not be here forever; but if we live fully, we may leave a foundation behind that someone else will build on.  This is the human condition — the condition of connectedness and oneness — that does not begin and end with the birth and death of one person.  There was a time when I was not here, and when I come full circle that will be true again.  But the world will go on.