david taus

Just Passing Through

music: Godspeed You Black Emperor!- Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven (d.2)

Through some incredible miracle of the natural order, a set of atoms and molecules combine in such a way to yield an independently functioning entity. Life is spawned against all galactic odds. While the majority of these bundles of molecules and chemical interactions never achieve more than the most basic instinctual and involuntary functions, a very select elite amass enough of the right kinds of chemical interactions and structural complexity to be called sentient. We lucky few, we 6.33 billion sentient biengs on this watery ball of rock, have been blessed with perhaps the most potent and complicated of all gifts in the known catalog of matter: awareness of our own life. If we are lucky, the precarious combination of molecules sustains our corporeal shells for 70 or 80 years, although rarely is our machinery able to carry us past 90 years. Our lives are defined by this limit, by the very certain and unwavering truth that one day in the future those processes which sustain our bodies will stop working. All of us know this, yet most of us refuse to believe it. Especially when it threatens us, our loved ones, and those we know. But in the end, of course, there is no getting around death. In its finality and absoluteness, death is perhaps the only thing that can properly define life.

Our consciousness is a blessing and a curse; we know from the beginning of our own self-awareness that we are working against a carefully veiled clock. That ultimately, no matter how important we are in life, how highly we measure on the human scale of greatness, we will end up worm food. Existentialism 101. I can remember one autumn night 20 or so years ago when the conditions of my own mortality hit me, I can remember crying and crying and mom asking what was wrong and me saying “i’m gonna die” and her growing worried thinking it was something that was to happen much much sooner than i was picturing. I, as well as the majority of humanity I’d imagine, doesn’t think in such severe terms all the time. Which is great. It helps us get on with our daily business, it allows us to pretend that we are somehow excused from the cycle of life on Planet Earth, that we serve a greater purpose. But as the lucky recipients of such a wonderous combination of chemicals and matter, we forget that we as humans are just passing through. On the times that we are confronted with death, things snap back into a more objectively proper perspective for a minute or two. If we are fortunate enough to have experienced that inexplicable series of chemical reactions we call love with regard to the departed, then things get painful on top of being unbearable.

My grandmother died on Saturday. She was 82. Her time was up, her clock had run down to zero. The time she borrowed on this material plane was full of experience, and me being her grandson much of this experience informed my own. But the natural order is a cruel master in its consistency; grandsons and grandmothers do not trump the cycling of nature. Her molecules were called to disband, serve a new purpose. She got 82 years, and in that time got her money’s worth. She was old, she was sick. It was her time. I can not complain, nor can I argue, but on this very real human level, it still hurts.

I made the trip to Milwaukee for Grandma’s funeral service and came back on Monday. The service itself was a modest one, simple and without frills. Appropriately. A roomful of Grandma’s family members, friends, and acquaintances gathered to pay respects and to share memories with each other. There was little fanfare, little broadcasting, little superflousness to the arrangement. Mom gave an incredible testimonial to Grandma’s life, one that I could only hope to approach had I that kind of time with Grandma, there was hugging, hand-shaking, and “i’m sorry-ing.” Even fewer went to Grandma’s apartment, the small corner of the universe she quietly occupied for over 30 years, and spent time. The scene was, in truth, odd and unsettling- for a gathering at Grandma’s apartment everything was askew. The table was facing the wrong direction; chairs were lined up in rows. Tables were set out on the driveway. Paper cups and paper plates. Strange food. Relatives I’d never met. The place was full of people, most familiar, most related, but things were not ok. The guest of honor, the social linchpin to the entire gathering, was missing. Her things were still there just as she left them-her perfume, her stacks of bills, refridgerator full of leftovers. Being in some version of Grandma’s apartment, having her presence gone but not fully vacated, was perhaps the hardest part. I had a day full of crying. I was glad to spend time with my family, my aunts and cousins, but that our last gathering in Grandma’s apartment was this one did not fit.

I am still shocked by the permanence of it all, the scope of finality surrounding death. I would like to think that although the physical vessel of Grandma has given out and been broken, some intact and pure essence of the lady floats somewhere, unencumbered by such faulty designs as the human body. As a matter of faith, though, I’m not sure I believe in such lofty things. What I do believe is that I, along with a handful of other souls, carry pieces of Grandma with us. I will always hear that voice ringing in my ears: “David, you have been given a great mind and it is your obligation to use it!” No small task, but this was no small lady. In the end of Grandma’s life, I reaffirm all those lessons and make them my own. And strangely, but not so strangely, my own life comes into sharper focus. I have been living closer to my own skin for the past couple of days, fully and vitally aware of my own human condition, that despite frequent tune-ups and oil changes I am not built to operate for more than 60 more years, and that although on even the planetary scale our singlular lives do not amount to much, on the human scale this synergy of molecules and reactions we call life is the most precious thing in the universe.

Posted by davidtaus at September 15, 2004 11:25 PM