Birthdays & Deathdays (Morbidity & Science)

The anniversary of the day of my birth was last Tuesday. I did not do much. Should I have? But my brother bought me dinner and my dad aims to as well, so I rest content.

I prefer to spend my birthdays reflecting on the previous year of life. But such reflections inevitably lead one to ponder the next year of life. But such reflections cannot be hindered from proceeding forward into "vast futurity" and, having escaped the narrow bounds of the present, to come to the black end of one's own life. I realized (when I did not artificially shut down this train of thought) that there is a certain poetic sense to it.

The day of one's death and the day of one's birth are harmoniously related. I am born into the world from God-knows-where (either nothingness, or some eternal bodiless pre-existence, or from mere gooey matter), live a space of twenty, eighty, or a hundred years (maybe a hundred twenty if anti-aging technology advances by leaps?) and then return to God-knows-where (either heaven or hell, or back to the starry heavens whence I came, or into dust and nothingness). Birth and death are both great mysteries, great transitions to a new world. What that new world is is only explained by God through theologians by Christian Revelation, or else we don't know and never will know, for most scientists do not concern themselves with such questions.

The death to which my mind so readily moves whenever I am prompted to think about "the past year"  does not seem so out of place, so strange, so "morbid" as I first felt.

For death is inevitable. When people say "that's morbid" I think they usually mean, "Don't think about such nasty things." For death, so they say, is dirty, unpleasant, and tasteless to dwell upon. And this is a valid complaint. Thinking about garbage heaps and public restrooms at the beach and eating day-old escargot is certainly unpleasant and tasteless to dwell upon (even mentioning them is a risk!) Gentlemen or even cads in polite company may forgoe useless attention to such unpleasantries. But is death such a thing as to be flippantly ignored? Clearly not.

Death is like a destination at the end of the train we are all riding. It is the plane landing at the airport in t-minus some-number-of-minutes whether we like it or not. It is the ultimate "End Freeway, 2 Miles" sign and there is simply no off-ramp.

There are two possible response to this inevitable unpleasantry. Ignore all the harder, or else give in and pay it some attention. Ignoring it (from observation) seems to involve drinking a fair amount, or else getting a very time-consuming job, or dating more than I have the time or money to afford. Hence I've decided to give in.

For this reason I embrace the yearly waypoint -- marking another day another hour, another minute, another second closer to the moment when I will forever close my eyes, waking up only to the mysterious beyond, or else not at all -- by having a drink, listening to songs and reading poems (Psalm 39 anyone? I'm not making this stuff up) about death. And not "death in general", but my death. My very own, personal, inevitably, signed and sealed but not yet delivered, bona fide, custom-designed, divinely appointed death.

Now, you may call me morbid...