Life (what to do with it)

The massacre in Connecticut -- like its precedents in Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, and Virigina -- bring back into public consciousness the desperate love of life that makes humans unique on this blue world. A lunatic armed with both malice and weapons rains down murder upon society and we collectively remember the idiom that, "you don't know what you've got until it's gone."

I wanted to avoid news reports in the aftermath of this most recent event. I listen to NPR several hours a day, so staying away from it posed a real challenge.... which I failed, listening to stories delivered in the conditional tense. This breaks my heart. Survivors -- which those of us who know of this event and continue to breathe surely are -- told of wanted futures. Especially from the youngest, who are always so impatient for the future. And here is life at its most easiest to identify.

Anyway, I'm glad for the failure because this event -- and the responses that came afterwards -- illuminated a contradiction at the centre of my existence that I better need to understand.

I confront death nearly every day. Not in a dramatic sort of way that doctors, police, or soldiers witness. Rather, I see it in the mirror in in my mind. Every day I confront my own death. Sometimes it's one sentence amidst the mundane internal dialogue ("wouldn't it be easier to die?"). Those are the better days because I can acknowledge its appearance, check that box, and get on with the day. Other times, it manifests like a physical force. I dread those days because I feel like a puppet.

And I feel certain that life is short.

People often describe suicides as "selfish." The survivors frame the act as one that refutes the power of love, the power of life, and the power of people. Suicides, in this context, receive a scorn that one rarely (if ever) applies to other manners of death. The suicide elevated their own needs above the needs of others: in other words, suicide sits at the apex of narcissism by depriving the world of one's own existence. I used to sympathise, if not downright agree, with this conclusion. I used this philosophical framework as a tool for pulling myself out of suicidal feelings. Pride, I believed, comes out one's accomplishments; however, suicide was a mundane accomplishment that most anyone could achieve, like tying one's shoes. It's so easy to die that I placed it outside the proud field. I no longer feel this way.  Pride comes out of what one can accomplish given the circumstances. If bathing is a goal within the conspiring circumstances of suicide, then be proud to achieve it. If one can survive twenty-four hours despite the conspiracy of annihilation, then be proud to achieve it.

My aunt reminded me, during a particularly difficult time, that lots of people love me. She reminded me that I have a wonderful dog, wonderful friends, and live much more comfortably than many others. I couldn't argue against her exercise in clarity but nor could I ignore the personal truth that all of that great stuff isn't enough. Great pain comes from the realisation that all of the love in the world cannot make one want to continue living.

Nietzche wrote that meaning of life is that it ends. I would add that the question of "how" life ends lies at the centre of human philosophy. Or, at least mine. Maybe suicide is not the fulfillment of the desire for death -- what the Greeks call thanatos -- but rather the acknowledgement that it arrives. Perhaps the suicidal do not want to die; rather, they see death on the horizon and feel powerless to stop its arrival.

On the radio, I heard people speak of the dead in terms of their anticipated future. This breaks my heart because the future belongs to the living. People want life. People expect life to continue. I want life and I hope that it will continue. But, I feel certain that life is short. Sometimes, the future might as well be Neptune. 

Other times, the future is tomorrow. I hope, and look forward, to seeing it.