On Death

A piece inspired by various scientific and philosophical ideas but most importantly by the beautiful Lady Maisery song ‘Order and Chaos’, their explanation and the superb video can be found here https://www.folkradio.co.uk/2016/11/lady-maisery-reveal-new-video-and-explain-the-science-behind-order-chaos/

Nothing in your teacher training prepares you for telling a class that their classmate has died without warning, even less so living with that fact, an empty seat in the classroom. How do they make sense of it? At 16 when death, as something which happens to only grandparents, comes so close. When a classmate will never again be present. What comfort can a teacher offer? Especially when many of their class don’t believe death is a rebirth. When the funeral encompasses the parent’s belief in a life after and the child’s steadfast rejection of it. When a traditional Funeral service is punctuated by Nick Cave, as if the child speaks to the parents:

I don’t believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do

What we are taught, whether consciously or unconsciously, through the roots of our culture is that we are separate, a soul, a mind existing in a body. When the body ‘dies’ you either believe the mind lives on or it does not, you are comforted or you embrace the cold reality. Our existence is like a lightbulb, either on or off.

However this is simply not true. Who ‘we’ are is by no means this certain. When we accept this we see that we are ‘embodied’ beings, not just minds inseparable from our own bodies but also from those we are closest to. While our consciousness may be gone, much of what matters to us still remains. Our memories, personalities, our selves are not created in a vacuum, they grow and develop between us and those around us. The crystallising of a memory is so often during the process of sharing a memory, we are humorous or loving with one another not alone. These threads live on at our ‘death’, incomplete yes, but they’re present in those we spent time with, those who have been shaped by us.

Our bodies live on too. For once again our culture is permeated by the myth of linear time. That things must begin and end, that we begin and end, from birth to salvation. In reality all time exists, in reality only change, without beginning or end, occurs. The atoms and molecules from which we are made do not disappear, the energy which animated us is dispersed throughout the world we inhabit, it returns from whence it originally came, chaos to order to chaos once more.

I’ve lost a friend and a student this year. But lost is the wrong word, provided they remain in our thoughts, provided their memories and the mark of their personality persist, provided we still walk the same earth (and they haunt my ukc logbook), they are still here. Not in the form we would want but not formless either. Not lost but shared until we too move from order to chaos.