The Grim Reaper Also Bears Gifts: Some Thoughts on Love, Longevity and the New Year

 

Recently the comedian Pete Holmes interviewed me for his podcast You Make it Weird. Holmes is a great interviewer and the conversation traversed many themes, one of which was the thorny subject of death. We didn’t dwell there too long, but I chatted with him about how a world with death is no doubt painful, but that a world without it would be even worse.

I’m not going to reflect here about how death is part of the biological life cycle, but instead want to touch on how it is a part of our subjective life.

To understand this we need to begin by bringing to mind how death brushes up against us many times in our life. For instance, when lovers separate, friends part or children grow.

Each of these signals the death of certain connections, and they can scar us deeply.

In the aftermath of such things we might devise all manner of strategies designed to protect us from feeling the sting again. We might hide away in hobbies that we can control, make oaths with the gods, or vow never to be vulnerable again.

Indeed, when someone says to a person they have just fallen in love with, “I wish this moment would last forever,” we can hint at a very understandable fear of the end that is nestled in the beginning. They want the euphoria, to continue without end.

But such an desire has its dark side.

Take the example of marriage proposals taken at the very point when the relationship is crumbling. This is a common, though rarely talked about phenomenon. While many people get married as a way of marking genuine love, there are times whenever people make this commitment as a way of repressing the collapse of what they once had.

Facing the end becomes so terrifying that they find themselves doing anything to deny its reality.

Of course, there are lots of other reasons that people decide to stay in a relationship where the feelings have died. For instance, someone might be concerned about her children, financial prospects or social standing. Indeed many couples who have come to accept the death of their romantic love, find ways to transition into a different type of relationship that allows them to live together as friends.

One of the strategies that some of us employ to protect ourselves from the trauma of death involves never really embracing life in the first place. When we view a castle, all we see are the ruins that it will one day be.

If one person defends against death by ignoring the reality that the structure decays, another defends himself by refusing to see the beauty the structure currently has.

What is truly difficult for us all is to embrace the castle, while acknowledging the reality of its decay. Not so that we despair, but so that we might both be able to better appreciate what we currently have and be able to bear the pain of eventual loss.

Entropy happens.

In our relationships as much as in spinning solar systems.

We can’t wall ourselves off from death without finding ourselves walled in by it.

Too many of us hold onto things that have long since turned to dust. Held captive by a memory, oppressed by a fear of endings, locked down by anxiety over the unknown.

But sometimes we need to make peace with death, and realise that the grim reaper also bears gifts.

The New Year is often a time where we think about what we want to do next in our lives, but it can also be a time when we symbolically let some things go. Taking time to accept what is already dead, to lay our wreaths and observe a wake. Asking ourselves what needs to be laid to rest for life to spring forth again.