On Mortality
The old joke about life is that none of us make it out alive. Death is one of the only things we entirely sure will happen to us at some point.
I just finished reading Audre Lorde’s A Burst of Light and Other Essays, and it got me thinking about mortality. I probably think about death more than your average twentysomething, but I’m fine with that. It strikes me as odd that more people don’t think about death more, though I realize that it is frequently more comfortable to not think about things that scare us deeply.
First things first: Audre Lorde has a way of writing and speaking that makes me feel so dumb. She asks questions so deep that they make me feel like I have never asked a good question before in my life, challenges things in a way that make me feel that I have never truly challenged anything before. The woman is SMART, y’all. I digress.
Lorde wrote these essays after receiving a diagnosis of liver cancer, the illness that ultimately ended her life. Throughout these essays, I am struck by her blazing will to live. During the last few years of her life, she refused chemotherapy and instead, made plans and traveled abroad and taught classes and wrote with a burning intensity, not knowing that she would only live 8 years past writing the essays she penned. Her will to live was immense. I think that we all have this desire in degrees, but something about accepting our own mortality gives us the courage we might otherwise lack to do things we intend to do in life.
Last year, an acquaintance of mine passed away tragically in a bike accident. He was 25, and by all measures, had his whole life ahead of him. I can’t honestly say that I knew him very well in life; he lived in the same dorm as me in undergrad, but he was super popular and handsome and our worlds didn’t really intersect. Yet when I heard he had passed, a heavy weight settled onto my chest and I wept for days. Even just writing this about him brings tears to my eyes, because he just had so much potential. And it made me weep for all of those who die young, because we will never know why MLK only got 39 years on this Earth with us. Had he lived to old age, it is entirely possible that my lifetime would have intersected with his. My classmate’s untimely death sparked a wave of reflection in me on mortality, some of which I’m sharing here.
“It is the unknown that we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.”
-Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling
Death does not scare me. My faith reassures me that when I die, I know exactly where I will go, little though I deserve to go there. Every single day that I wake up in the morning, I thank God, because to me, that means that I have more work to do. If I had completed the task I was supposed to complete, I’d be home in heaven right now.
There is a passage in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that expresses how I feel about the links between mission and lifespan. It’s a long quote, but bear with me:
“…Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive. His job was to walk calmly into Death’s welcoming arms. Along the way, he was to dispose of Voldemort’s remaining links to life, so that when at last he flung himself across Voldemort’s path… Neither would live, neither could survive….
Of course there had been a bigger plan; Harry had simply been too foolish to see it. He had never questioned his own assumption that Dumbledore wanted him alive. Now he saw that his lifespan had always been determined by how long it took to eliminate all the Horcruxes. Dumbledore had passed the job of destroying them on to Harry, and obediently he had continued to chip away at the bonds tying not only Voldemort, but himself, to life! How neat, how elegant, not to waste any more lives, but to give the dangerous task to the boy who had already been marked for slaughter, and whose death would not be a calamity, but another blow against Voldemort.”
-Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling, (added emphasis mine)
For context, Harry is approaching the moment where he must defeat the evil wizard Voldemort once and for all. It has been his life’s mission since he was born, though he just discovered it expressed in such stark terms (via prophecy) a few years ago. In short, he has a job to do, and fulfilling the job will complete his mission, but it will also end his life. This is pretty much how I see mission and calling in this world, and it’s not scary to me! For real. I have a task to complete here in this life, and when I finish it, I get to go home. I’m not going to make it out of life alive, as indeed no one does, and so my lifespan is determined by exactly how long it takes me to fulfill my calling in life. Every morning I wake up, I know that it is because my life’s work is not yet complete. I have more work to do.
I’m currently reading Mark Batterson’s Chase the Lion; in it, he talks about having a dream that outlasts one’s lifetime. In the Bible, King David got the vision for building the Lord’s temple, but he merely assembled the materials. It was his son, King Solomon, that actually built the temple. Likewise, Moses received the command to take the Israelites into the Promised Land, but he never actually made it there. I believe I am in the midst of working on a vision that will outlast my own lifetime. The writers I read inspire that conviction within me. I think of myself as primitive woman, scratching out what might as well be a stone-chiseled record of my life on this great palimpsest that the Internet will one day become when we are in a post-technology world. This is why writing means so much to me; it is “a power that will outlast kingdoms” (James Baldwin). My writing is not just a record of my life; let it be a record of WHY I lived.
One of the most interesting writing exercises I did in the past few years was writing my own will. (I know, I know, that sounds super morbid, but 1) it’s my life 2) I wanted to write it 3) it doesn’t mean I don’t want to live for a long, long time! But as a tool, it is helping me accept a very deep life reality at a young age.) After writing it, I realized afresh: I really want to exist! Even more than that, I want my life to have meaning. To paraphrase the poet Dylan Thomas, I do not want to go gentle into that good night; I will rage, rage against the dying of the light. I have a reason for being here, and I want very much to live and fulfill that mission. I also think that, for me, fulfilling that mission is ultimately what will end my life. But I can’t think of a better way to go out in than in a blaze of glory, doing the work that God has called me to do.
Every day I ask myself, “What am I here working for? What will I leave behind me?” These are the questions that I know I don’t necessarily have 50 years to spend thinking about. All I have is today.
There’s only us, there’s only this
Forget regret, or life is yours to miss
No other road, no other way
No day but today-Rosario Dawson, RENT (the musical)