The Dead of Winter
I’ve believed for years now that the closer I get to the end of life, the less cluttered and mediated my life should be. A sort of preparation: I want to face the next chapter as unencumbered as possible. As clear headed and wide-eyed as possible. When I die, I want to be able to reflect, unobstructed, on the life left behind, noting how much of it was my doing and how much of it was made by others. I want to take a full measure of my will — to die with having as much full-knowledge of my regrets and graces. I want God to have all of me and not leave a molecule behind.
My ghosts are my memories, the ones so embedded in my psyche that I feel the need to begin praying at the moment my mind returns to them. And I’m haunted not so much by the regret of having not done more, but by not recognizing and allowing the gifts that I’ve been given to have borne fruit earlier in my life. Too many distractions and the lack of will. Too caught up in the here and now. Too desirous of wanting or needing to be a person that I was never intended to be.
My epitaph might read: “I am much of whom I was and most of whom I was intended to be.” I think it captures the idea of human “being” pretty well. Because we, as a reflection of the “world” we live in, are in constant flux; but there is also no denying how our lived pasts continue to influence our constant making and re-making.
And yet I would still argue that there is an undeniable essence to Our Being — our uniqueness — that we, at our worst, want to deny and challenge; but only to our ultimate detriment. That denial creates the dis-ease that fosters ills, physical and emotional.
If nothing else, I have strived to live in accordance with what I believe Creation has outlined for me. And I have been willing to “pick up my Cross,” and to then suffer its consequences. That’s amounted to many joyful moments but perhaps even more heart-wrenching ones, as I have watched far too many of my loved ones die, many times as I have held them and they had breathed their last breaths.
I have had two visions of how I’ll die. I don’t sleep much, so I don’t dream much. But these have been recurring so I figure that they must mean something. (No coincidences for me, I’m afraid!)
The first has featured me, out in the dark, on a busy rural road, trying to usher off an opossum from it and then getting hit and killed while doing so. This has nearly happened, once with an opossum, three times. So not much of a stretch!
In the second, I am shot and killed, anonymously and from afar, by someone whom I know does not like my politics/way of life/etc. A bit more of a reach; but given where I live and the foes that I’ve made over the years here, maybe not.
Either way would be just fine by me.
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