Death Does Not Become Us.

I’ve been to more funerals than I ever care to go to.

I attended my very first funeral waaaaaaay back in 1979 in the dead of winter from the warmth of my mother’s womb. Her brother — my uncle — became my namesake after he was shot in the neck at close range and left to die a few days later.

And then when I was just a teenager, a friend of a friend of a friend that lived right down the street next to Mr. Harrison accidentally shot himself with his father’s old rusty pistol.

Not long after that particularly traumatizing moment in the neighborhood’s history, a junior-high-schooler decided to play chicken with an imposing freight train and lost. The poor bastard was actually alive for a couple days before he passed on. So much physical damage was done to his tiny 6th grade frame, I doubt he’d want to stay alive anyhow.

Later through my high school years, young Black and brown men were losing battles to violence at a rate that seemed to be daily. And though the rapid fire of young souls headed to their final destination was certainly known to be abnormal, it was also so frequent and interwoven into our daily survival that attending a funeral service for someone that could have easily been my classmate was simply accepted.

Since that time, I’ve lost a good friend that was robbed for pocket-change, shot savagely in the back of the head, then burned like trash only to be discovered at a point her body was so charred it was beyond identification.

I’ve lost a friend to a bad drug deal in a Walgreen’s parking lot. And a friend stabbed to death over a few bucks and a dog.

I’ve lost a nephew to gunplay. I lost a cousin on Christmas day to gunplay too.

Numerous associates and passersby and people that I have known over the years have died either violently or through disease. And still after being baptized in all this tragedy, I never once really thought of my own mortality.

Never.

With all these lives ending did I think about what it meant to die? I figured that eventually death is something that becomes who we are.

It wasn’t until I was an active duty Marine soon to deploy overseas that I was forced to think about all the possibilities of my demise when these thoughts began to surface. Sure, I was curious about what’s next after this physical life — if there is a next. And of course I was scared shitless at the possiblity of not just dying…but no longer existing at all.

Yet, even above all of those things, I was terrified at the prospect I could leave my children to navigate this cold, shitty world without the love of a father. It was the knowing that I couldn’t physically shield them or protect them or guide them that frightened the living fuck outta me the most.

So going against what I thought I knew all this time, I questioned God and looked for the answers to our mortality. This need-to-know fueled a passion for death and its secrets. And after a long journey, I reached a point of satisfaction with things believing I knew what was to come with still a single shred of doubt still lingering in the back of my head.

When my dad died, those anxious feelings came back.

What happens when we die?

This is a question I am sure you have asked yourself or God. You may have pondered the meaning independently or sought truth after the untimely loss of your own loved one. While it is quite easy to push your faiths onto someone else — and spirituality is purely a vehicle of faith — our present world is dominated by truth that come in the form of material experiences.

If we can’t touch or taste or hear or feel it, then it’s not true. And even sometimes when we do, we question our reception. But still, the idea that we have all the tools necessary to create conclusions is the law of this world, so operating with that train of thought, I present this idea:

Nothing dies in a world where life is a circle and not a straight line.

Microorganisms feed over animal carcasses. Plants feed on the microorganisms. And then bugs eat up all the plants. Birds and rodents eat the bugs. And the small animals eat the birds and rodents. Medium sized animals eat at the smaller animals. And the largest of all animals eat the medium ones. Surely those large ones are apex predators, but they die eventually, only to become animal carcasses that feed the microorganisms that started the cycle of life in the first place

And in this sense, if nothing dies…then nothing lives.

This must apply to human life too.

Without needing much more explanation or reflection, by just realizing our role in the greater world, I understand that the greater laws of nature, and thus the universe, matter just as much to us in this thing. We all — every last one of us — must die to live.

I now realize that more than ever when I see a young plant stretching its leaves toward the sun to embrace it’s place in this world. Death doesn’t become who we are. It’s already a part of us. And we are always a part of life.