D E A T H

So, some of us are getting old now ...

These bodies we've lived in and as for however many years must one day cease in their functioning.

We've worked so hard on accepting ourselves and modifying ourselves and in the end it must fall.

I'm very thin, I look like a skeleton covered lightly with skin and hair.

Sometimes I wonder how it will happen. Will the heart start pumping like a tired cyclist and then ... stop?

And that's it, over? This whole thing, done? Weird.

I don't want the doctors of death to modify my dead body once it's dead.

That means no autopsy type of thing and no makeup or anything like that.

If my dead body looks ugly then good golly miss molly I want people to see my ugly dead body! Don't you?

Where is our sense of the macabre gone? Why do we hide our dead under makeup? To hide from death?

Some weeks ago I wrote to myself :

do you know that death is your future?
that, although you are chasing life, death chases you?
knowing this, grieve not for the dead

when you are certain of your own death, the death of others becomes but a question of how well they know this truth themselves

if you do not weep at the thought of your own dissolution, why then should you weep for others, knowing this is the fate of all?

therefore be unmoved by the rising and falling motion of this universal existence. neither cry with joy at the birth of one nor with misery at the death of another

it is only the attachment to transiency which causes this pain

that very attachment is ignorance, it is unknowing, it is confusion, it is great illusion

when someone dies, say nothing

if asked, speak the truth humbly, that all will perish, yet do not preach or deride them for their painful confusion born of ignorance - neither should they be given fairy tales, for this has no lasting value

contemplate that death as your own, as a sign that it is never far, and it will take you as it takes your loved ones and all others, and that though they may seem old it is but a day from now when you too shall see it face to face

do not fear these contemplations or deem them macabre, for they are the very truths of life and to ignore them in favor of ignorance is the greatest mistake

meditate on these truths, that though you are here and attached to a great many things, all shall be taken from you

this is wisdom which will comfort you through all times

when the end is known, what fear can there be?

why should one fear death when so many have entered?

one can do little but accept it, so do so

in your very lifetime, go searching for the deathless