A Brief Note on Death

A book I read I read once and still have in my library, John Bowker's The Meaning of Death mentioned the story of Ulysses and his return voyage home during which many of his company's were lost during storms at sea, victims of Poseidon's rage.

In the past few months, I have seen so many deaths that I deem significant to me in some way or the other, some not wholly unexpected, others tragic in how abruptly the life of the person ended. I suppose it has to do with the concept that every life has a purpose, something I subscribe to only from a perspective of free will as opposed to determinism. John Irving's position, cum Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules, that the most we should aspire to be is "of use" is the one I find personally most comfortable.

Yet, reading up on Barack Obama's life story, for example, you seem to get the idea that his parents existed simply to bring him into the world, or that he was the central purpose of their union. The recent death of his grandmother sort of confirms this.

The deaths that have affected me personally however in recent times are those of Alicia Foster (whom I only met once), David Foster Wallace and David DeCaires. It is easy for someone with an imaginative bent such as I have to see the obvious linkages between the names but I attribute this only to coincidence.

I am agnostic which basically means that I am not stupid enough to believe that any one misconstrued illusion (we call them religions) is of any more or any less validity than the next one, nor I am arrogant enough to say that this life, with its basic mystery of existence, is the summation of everything. I do not obsess too much therefore with what lies after death; my concern is with the quality of life one leads here.

It is ironic that, in the midst of all this death or my heightened sense of it, my son - just five years old in two weeks - asked a few days ago whether I wanted to be "buried or burned." And a week before that he made the brief decision that he was going to stop eating meat after seeing a television programme showing animals being slaughtered for food.

That he should grasp such a concept at so tender an age is astonishing to me but also sad. A sense of mortality should not be for the young because, unless tragedy strikes, they are invincible and immortal.