Constant Memento Mori
Someone recently recommended the WeCroak app to me: “Each day, we’ll send you five invitations to stop and think about death. Our invitations come at random times and at any moment, just like death. When they come, you can open the app to reveal a quote about death from a poet, philosopher, or notable thinker.”
It might be a great idea for some but, yeah, I don’t need that. I’ve got my own built in reminders that show up at least five times a day. As the dust and smoke fill the skies around me and abled people unmask in oblivion and with abandon - I end up with a quite rigorous daily impermanence practice.
On my long walks I watch ravens and buzzards gobble up the carcasses of unfortunate rodents and reptiles. I see tufts of rabbit fur caught in the brush, surrounded by coyote tracks. Once, as my daughter and I walked in the arroyo we heard a raven and a hawk squabbling overhead and the leg of a jackrabbit fell from the sky and landed a few feet in front of us.
I wonder what the odds are that I make it “through” the various crises that surround me. Negotiating immunocompromise in a pandemic. Living in the southwest through mega wildfires and megadrought. Maintaining a cancer remission until I reach the “stable” five year mark. Avoiding the other attendant risks for our strained era: an increase in car accidents and drunk driving, intensifying stochastic terrorism and gun violence, heat related illness, stress related illness, an overwhelmed health care system. I might not worry overmuch that I will die from acute covid, but I do feel concerned about the various longer term dangers of this insidious novel bat virus that everyone else seems to be excited to contract several times a year. My blood and neurology are already compromised. I imagine I could be more susceptible to things like blood clots and stroke, further damage to my immune system. Or maybe a just brand new cancer or a heart attack.
I mean, maybe I’ll be around for another twenty or twenty-five years. I’m sure it would be a hard and mournful couple of decades, but joyful and meaningful too. I hope I do get that time, to love all the people I love as much as I can, to pitch in and help out in whatever way is viable. I’d like to toss my energies in toward pulling and pushing for better outcomes.
But let’s face it, it won’t be surprising if I don’t get to.
As I walk I look back at the house from a distance and imagine my children getting along without me. As they near adulthood this becomes more tolerable than it used to. I imagine them strong and industrious with broken but brave hearts. I imagine my husband growing his shaggy grey “old goat” beard without any complaints from me. I imagine how the house would change, the clutter that would accumulate without me there to initiate a purge.
I like to try to practice being peaceful with all potential outcomes. And if, as the label on the bottle of castile soap says - All is One! and linear time is an illusion - then all things past and present, all potential futures and multiverses exist at once simultaneously - then this life of mine, as I perceive it, is just one journey of one worm gnawing its one-directional path through one big old apple.
My son, when he was young, and had learned that a family member was potentially gravely ill, said: “Maybe praying is just asking to switch multiverses, and it doesn’t matter so much since all of them are real at once.”
I don’t know if the single thread I am attached to in this complex web stretches out for inches, feet or miles.
I spent the first two years of remission (one year before and one year into the pandemic) feeling deeply entitled to rest as my central activity. I imagined I would do nothing but rest until the end of my days. Helping out a bit here and there as a side dish, but with rest as the main course. I had the strong sensation that the central plot of my life story was over and done with and I was now just coasting through the epilogue, however long it may last, my work completed.
But in the past few months I am suddenly whisked back into the story and back into action, filled with a different energy, almost an urgency to make certain I do all that I came here to do, that I give out everything that I am called to (and no more - rest is still both necessary and sacred if not the central practice), to say exactly what I have to say and stop worrying about the timing or the consequences.
Maybe my rest was disrupted when lock downs and remote schooling were discontinued and my household was, and continues to be, forced into to more exposure to this virus than we would opt for. Maybe the only way I can metabolize this much threat is to launch myself into creative generative action. Maybe because the dangers are closing in, like the weather and winds and heat, the daily risks keep escalating and normalizing simultaneously, bit by bit, every single day.
Increasingly I feel an internal mandate to lay it all out, do all I can, cough it up, spit it out. It’s not like there some better time to wait for, nothing I spy on the horizon that indicates that anything will get easier, or safer, or more comfortable to stick my neck out.
It seems to me that this is the moment. Why wait for something to get worse or better? We all stand at the crossroads. Poised at crucial tipping points. If I have some rough idea of what I might have to offer, of what I need to preserve, of what I am ready to fight for and stand for, what I have to give, what I do not - it seems to me it is time.
If not now, when? What on earth is there to wait for?
