To do's, Homework, and Death

The collision between taking a class about death, reading some essays written by an undertaker, and being human, and therefore subject to the human condition, has put me in a morbidly pensive mood. It doesn’t help that I am sitting at Starbucks, across the street from Peachtree Baptist, which has columns and a steeple, and comes complete with its very own graveyard.

I am going to die.

Death is one of those funny things that you can’t really imagine. You can’t think about it, you can’t reason it. It defies all knowledge.

I can imagine myself eating a piece of pie, or riding a roller coaster, or drinking a cup of coffee. I can even imagine myself doing all three at the same time.

But I can’t imagine my own death. Or what it’s like to die. Because even when I try, I am there as a witness. Even when I see my own dead body in my mind’s eye, there I am looking at my body.

None of us can imagine being unconscious, or dead. Just one of those weird things that should probably constantly remind us just how limited we are.

But it remains that we are all going to die. While we can’t imagine it, we know it. And we are the only creatures in the world who know it. Everything dies; we are the only ones who know that we will. And we spend most of our lives avoiding it, or not thinking about it, or joking about it. Ha ha ha. Nervous laughter, staring into the abyss of nothingness. Ha.

We would all do well to remember our finitude. Our deaths. The way that Christmas sneaks up on you every year, and the way that time begins to move faster and faster the older we get, like a rock rolling down a hill, gathering no moss, because you can’t use moss when you’re dead, and that’s where the rock is rolling, shattering at the bottom.

So my ‘to do’ list this week includes:

1. Read a 200-page book (about death) and write a 5-page paper on it.
2. Read a book about Mikhail Bakhtin.
3. Read some Barth.
4. Read some Descartes.
5. Read some (insert whatever eclectic text Lowe wants us to read this week).
6. And die someday.

Of course most of our life ‘to do’ lists are more complicated:

1. Graduate grad school.
2. Do more school.
3. Get a job – teach, preach, sell automobiles.
4. Get married.
5. Make babies.
6. Write the great anti-American novel.
7. And die someday.

Or something like that. And all of us just hope that ‘die someday’ stays at the bottom of the list, after we finish everything else, or maybe even we’ll be just too busy to get around to it.

But that’s okay, because if we don’t get around to it, it will get around to us. And get around us. And choke us out of existence. Ha.

And the ‘someday’ could be any day. That’s what really makes us laugh. It’s really the most unpredictable item on the list (assuming there are no women on your list). It can move up a few spaces, or even all the way to the top. It might be the next thing on your list, and you don’t even know it. Ha ha.

But one thing for sure, unless you are Enoch or Elijah (and even they probably didn’t make it out of the atmosphere without burning up), it’s on your list. And you’ll get to it someday. And it will get you.

Death knocks, and knocks down, and knocks up our minds with images and fears and all that good stuff. It drives the meaning of our lives. This is maybe the funniest thing of all – death, our eventual and inevitable nonexistence, is what gives meaning to what we do while we are alive. We only live a short time, then we die – so what we do with our limited space on the temporal timeline is most significant. We wouldn’t want to waste it.

At least that is what we are fooled into believing. And fools we are, because how could anything so blip-like be so important?

Here’s the truth: there is nothing, absolutely nothing, not one thing, you can do with or in your life – whether you live a year or 120 – that won’t be forgotten after you die. There is no accomplishment or great important deed you can do whose effects and meaning won’t become a moot point at some point in the never-ending future. That’s right. Ha ha. Shakespeare himself, along with every beautiful word he wrote (or made up), will be forgotten someday, and anything he has contributed to society, and all those he has influenced – all forgotten. And are you Shakespeare? No, most of us are less than that – how much more easily will we be forgotten? Not just our names, or what we’ve done, or any lasting effects, but our very existence – wiped from the memory of creation.

So what is the point?

Enter stage right: God, religion, baby Jesus, and heaven everlasting. Oh yeah, and my favorite: Resurrection.

I gave up talking about these things for Lent. But really, maybe we should give up talking about them all together when we talk about death. Because they are just distractions. They are the easy way out. And they are de-valued when we de-value death in light of them.


As a result, and in light of all this, I have no motivation to do homework.