Who’s Ready to Die?

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately (yeah, I’m a bundle of laughs, eh?) and then I woke up this morning to the news that a friend’s husband died suddenly last night. He was there one minute and gone the next. Heart attack. Massive.

I’ve been thinking about my own death and I guess everyone else’s as well, since we all will die and I know so many people who’ve lost loved ones in the past year or so, including me.  It’s such a theme in my life right now that I feel as if something is telling me to pay attention.

I’m not really afraid to die; I think that it may be the greatest thing that ever happens to us. We leave the bonds of our human bodies, our human frailty, our human pain and that sounds pretty damned good.

I’m not sure exactly what we become, but I believe we become a wonderful, loving energy. The same energy that animates all of us at our core; the energy of God/creator/life.

The tough part is those left behind, right? The human condition. The person that leaves us to become loving energy isn’t the one suffering. We cannot imagine life without their physical presence. We’re not ready to let them go, to walk the earth without them. We may even believe that they are indeed, in a ‘much better place’ and yet, we still mourn their passing. Not for them, but for us.

And that’s okay. I wish as we progressed and evolved, death would become easier for us, but it seems as if it’s even harder to accept. We live under the illusion that technology can fix anything;  that we shouldn’t die.  After all this is 2015! We can put a man on the moon, Skype, make robotic limbs, orbit the earth, hack into sophisticated computers, kill people without ever seeing them with drones and clone sentient beings in labs. Why on earth do we still die?

I think that we’re too removed from death anymore. From our food that comes pre-packaged, no longer resembling the living beings that provide it to the way people are whisked off to hospitals to die, we just never see it or absorb that it’s such an integral part of our lives. We tuck it away and don’t want to look and so we deny the inevitable.

We fear it like nothing else. One friend told me, “I’m afraid that it will hurt and that’s why I’m scared”. What doesn’t hurt? Life hurts and yet, we cling to it like drowning rats. I suspect that most deaths are quite peaceful and yet how would we know since we never see it? I suspect that those who work in health care, who see death daily, might have a different view than the rest of us, but I’ve never really heard any of them talk about it.

I’ve been reading and listening to various spiritual teachers regarding life and death and spirit. The consensus is that we are infinite spirits. We’re not really ‘born’ and we don’t really ‘die’; we morph or manifest or arrive in our human form and then we move on again. To what, I really don’t know, but the more I study, the more curious I become. You are energy; you are light; you are love, as are those you’ve lost. Don’t let the silly stuff of human life clip your wings. Nurture your soul because that’s really who you are. You are infinite.