Most of us don’t know when we are about to die and that our inescapable day has arrived.
That seems surprising, considering that we will all, without exception, wake up one day on the last day that we will ever wake up. No more sleeping, no more waking up.
Some people probably do know that their time has come. Some people whom I have known seemed to already be in the company of other beings than the ones sitting beside their beds, who are valiantly trying to keep up a conversation with the one who is referring to the presence of other beings than the ones sitting next to her. My mother-in-law “invented” a second floor above the one-story home where she resided for her final months, which she had apparently visited that very morning.
Perhaps to be straddling two worlds is a good way to leave this one.
Meanwhile here I sit fully embedded in a world that seems far more real than any other. When I say ‘embedded’, I’m not visualizing a Mafioso victim standing at the end of a dock with his feet immersed in concrete blocks. It’s just a metaphor for living inside a mind that has been molded by an entire encyclopedia of assumptions and educated in well-worn ways of looking at the flying moments of lived experience.
Embedded in this closed world of already known facts and pre-existing structures of understanding, I don’t believe I have ever had the thought; “This is my last day here.”
I will be ‘surprised’ if this thought shows up on my last day either.
That kind of surprise might provide a moment for me to hope that I have already packed a few things in hidden pockets of being, which might prove useful if some kind of journey continues.
And on this particular day, today, whether it is my last one on Planet Earth or not, I am glad to discover that the possibility of hope still finds a home in me.
Beautiful, Michael. You bought me hope today.
Pat