The thing about stories is they have to have endings. It could be short or long but the story must end. I like to look at Death as what makes Life so precious. That we will cease to be makes our existence miraculous.
I marvel at both the singularity with which we arrive on as well as depart this Earth, yet at the same time the common universality of it. We each have a unique origin story and we will have a unique ending, but all humans are born and die and eventually dissolve.
When someone we love dies, all the memories we have with them, the conversations we had they run through our minds, our hearts. The way they looked on their death bed, their bodies giving out and giving up is seared into us, unable to be rinsed off. That last touch… that last look into their eyes… the final time they recognized us in their fading consciousness.
That’s the spiritual, emotional sort of experience of what we take. There’s also the experience of the physical death, the smell of it as organs decay and halt their essential functions. It is this impossible to forget ordeal. There is an inner churning as we witness that is impossible to describe and unable to be duplicated.
An education takes place as we witness the end of a Life. The sound of a rattle, deep and ominous within the throat as they labor to continue breathing. We learn that is the Death Rattle, telling us what is imminent. These are just a few things we learn as we are faced directly and painfully with mortality.
We remember all the ways this person was there for us in ways that no one else thought to be. We recall the moments of understanding which passed between only us two. Eventually we feel healed enough in our grief to call out to this Soul from the great beyond imploring them to assist us in this endeavor of Life. We attempt to invoke the strength or compassion they showed because we need it even though they are gone.
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