Presence
Occultation
There are various ways of dealing with the actuality that all lives, ours and those of the people we love, have an end. The oldest form of human coping with the finiteness of life is avoidance. Pushing death as far from ourselves as possible, by holding an unshakable belief in our own immortality.
Or we can face it as a fact of our own existence; adjust our behaviour towards other people, to the limited amount of time remaining. Make our parting from our fellow human beings as pleasant as possible.
Many people die gradually over months; they grow infirm, they dim out. The last hours are important, of course. But often the process of dying - and thus of parting ways - begins much earlier. Frailty is often enough to sever the bond between the ill and the living. Decline isolates them, they may grow inward, become less sociable, their feelings less warm, without their need for people being extinguished. That is the hardest thing — the tacit and gradual cooling of their relationship with the community of the living.
This is the hardest part, not only for those in pain, but for those who are left alone. We're no longer inured to the thought of Death. We no longer regard it as a Sunday entertainment or a gladiatorial contests. Compared with antiquity, our empathic bond is much tigther.
'Morituri te salutant'. The Gladiators of Rome announced serenely, proving - yet again - that Death is a problem of the living. Dead people have no problems, the danger of annihilation is a fulfilled promise.
And Janus-faced: inward resigned and outward hesitant, we proceed toward our genetically predetermined fate.
It is not the actuality of death, but the knowledge of oblivion, that creates problems. Just like a fly caught between two fingers, the human being struggles in its throes, actively seeking to be deceived. But whereas a monkey's or a fly's individual instinct becomes a public virtue, Humans know.
But nothing really ever dies, energy just transforms.
"How long?", he asks in a coarse voice, his gaze fixed on the wall in front of him. And the young doctor is taken back. "A few weeks, could be a couple of months. I'm sorry", he says, burying his nose in his binder.
And he nods.
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