Saturday, July 13, 2013

Fear, part 1: Death


Death of Hyacinthe,  Jean Broc
American culture fears death.  Ya.  So what else is new?

We fear death so much that we have evolved a whole culture of evasion and avoidance and ignorance regarding it.  $10.4 BILLION dollars per year are spent on cosmetic surgery to avoid looking old.  $60 BILLION dollars per year spent on diets and related products.   Despite mounting evidence that we do, as a matter of fact, have a 100% chance of dying, most Americans seem to think that it can be banished to some dark corner never to be thought about; that by our constant evasion of it, perhaps Death will not catch us.

I recently had a somewhat disturbing series of encounters with a video-transfer client over several days.  His mid-20s son had recently passed away, and the client was absolutely desperate to recover some video footage of him.  He was insistent on maintaining his son's Facebook page, tracking down and retrieving all photos, video, and audio of his late son, and so he called me repeatedly for nearly a week, multiple times a day, rehashing over and over the various things he had tried to get this tape to play, and the repairs on all his video cameras, the mistakes he may or may not have made, storage issues, his bad luck:  on and on.  
Because it is my business to listen to people, I listened.  I heard his panic as he contemplated losing even a moment of his son's recorded life.  I could not make promises as far as being able to fix either his tape or recover the footage, but I told him I would do what I could.

When I met him in person to receive a precious videotape from him, I immediately felt his prickly energy.  His anxiety and terror were palpable even at a distance.  While I was able to repair his video tape so it could be played, I was not able to capture the footage (a common problem when video was shot with a camera whose recording heads were out of alignment).  This set off another chain of anguished and lengthy phone calls from him, asking me questions that I could not answer about various recording devices, and more to the point, just venting about his bad luck, his bad life, his unbearable loss.

At a certain point, I had to speak bluntly to this man:  "Look -- all of these things are ephemeral.  Photographs fade.  Recordings get erased.  Facebook will be go away.  Getting your videotape to play is not going to bring your son back to you.  (Long pause.) The best way to be with your son is to be quiet, and meditate, and ask him to be with you."

And then he cried out, "But the digital age was supposed to change all that!"

What exactly was it supposed to change?  Was the digital age supposed to erase death?  




(I remember the promise that you would be able to store all of your college work on one CD.  Clearly, that hasn't worked out, as our data needs have expanded to fit the available volume of storage.  Those shiny plastic discs, once thought to be indestructible, turned out to be even more ephemeral than good old paper.  Loss is inevitable.) 

In a related observation, I have seen the reluctance of elderly people to part with their stacks of mail, old newspaper clippings, bits of things that "might come in handy one day".  They seem to be saying, I cannot or will not die as long as I still have this pile of mail to go through… The stacks are some kind of assurance of their necessity and their presence.  As if people didn't die every day in the middle of doing the dishes, or folding the laundry.

A lifetime of American culture has been ingrained in me, and yet I do know, because of my channeling experiences, that there is so much to look forward to after our bodily life is over.  We do get to return to a state of absolutely unconditional acceptance and love.  It is almost impossible for people to imagine such a situation, invested as we are in our human form.  We have forgotten from whence we came, and to where we shall return.  It is not ashes to ashes, dust to dust -- but rather Spirit to Spirit and star to star.  We do not need to be afraid, and yet it is such a part of our culture..  Let us move from fear to love.   
Yes, we do miss our departed friends, family, pets -- but they are still always with us.  We just have to sit still, and listen.


Another way to remember
Dia de los Muertos group altar, 2012