This morning I received news of a death - friend’s father’s sudden passing. His hands frozen in time - gripping the steering wheel and handbrake of the car, which he managed to park in front of their family home after a party that night. He was young and still full of life, but now this.
How swiftly that is taken away. Here today, then gone tomorrow.
Such is the fleeting nature of life. We all live and yet one day, that exact moment we will never fully know, we will leave this earth. That is an inescapable fact, but then we don’t want it. We balk at the idea of death showing up in our circles, more so on our very doors. But is every death we experience this kind of death? THE Death, the END? Do we not experience death in the everyday little things?
Many times we’ve heard that fact that tens of thousands of skin cells die off each and every minute of our waking life. This allows the skin to regenerate. Skin cells die to allow new ones to live. So we do die a little every day. And we don’t even notice it.
While there is that passive death, there are also the more active kind.
When a child graduates from kindergarten, elementary and high school. When you get a promotion at work. When you change break up with a partner. When you have a falling out with a friend. When you change and move on to other passions.
One thing end, then another one begins.
It is a natural progression, possibility, yet so uncomfortable. Often we want to stay with our old selves - the comfort of the familiar. Even if there are chances that the old life does not feel right anymore. These little deaths don’t exactly have the fuzzy, warm feelings you get from a hot beverage in your hand on a chilly day.We hang on to dear old life because we don’t know what lies ahead. We can’t see far out, what the next days, months, years or decades would look like.
Parts of myself have been dying and continue to do so, yet here I am hanging on to who I was or who I thought I should be. But still my insides shudder at the thought of the pressures that I allowed to carry inside, kept bottle up and, in the long run, imploded on myself.
That part of me died many times over. I revived myself many times over. Is it time to give myself the do-not-resuscitate order and allow my soul to move on? Then what?
I still don’t know the exact answer. I still don’t know if there would be a place where I would actually be allowed to do so. After all, it is a dance, that I fit snugly into the crook of their elbow and as they would in mine and we would be lockstep, having fun, to the beat of the same music.
I thought that the end of that journey would bring me into food writing. My love for food is in my blood, being born into a family who is obsessed with it. Millions of clean plates and meals shared across the world, a library of food books, road trips with food as the main objective, recipes tried, cultures explored.
Once I had more time and space to write, I even wrote number of pieces on the local weekly and Eater. Fabulous exposure and experience. A gateway to possibility of a dream come true.
But one day, I woke up not wanting to write about food. I just couldn’t deal with it anymore. There was no urge to visit and try restaurants, both new and old but never visited. There was no drive to be involved in the endless faux pas of the US food media discourse. I didn’t care anymore. All that passion just dissipated into thin air.
I know that this isn’t the first time that this happened to me, realizing that I no longer loved a thing anymore. Another death, another end.
This made me think of The Death card, tarot’s poster child that scares the bejeezus out of everyone. The thirteenth card. The one that’s blessed the tarot with such a bad rap. The one that immediately conjures up THE Death, the END that shakes us to the very core of our mortal existence.
A skeleton inside a black knight’s armor atop a white noble, red-eyed steed, holding up a black coat of arms flag with a white rose, steps over a fallen king with his golden crown by the wayside. Those hollow eye sockets pierce one’s being, swallowing one into the darkness of the unknown. The glory of prestige trampled upon. One that was once up top, now down at the bottom. The Pope, dressed in his golden robes with his pastoral staff in the mud, standing up to the black rider, hands together in prayer. A flower crowned maiden in a white robe on her knees looks away, while a child, also in the same flower crown on her knees, offers the rider a bouquet.
But the scene behind them isn’t enrobed in pitch black darkness and gloom as we imagine Death to be.
A river idly runs its course behind the battlefield. Across it are two towers that frame the sun rising from its slumber. The sun’s rays pierce through the grey overcast sky. After the darkness comes the light. The night does not last; the morning comes again.
It is a cycle, the circle of life. After death, comes life. As in life’s little deaths, the endings signal the arrival of a beginning. The light soft, inching it’s way around the darkness. It grows, brighter and brighter, until the night fades away. Then one is completely surrounded by the light. Everything illuminated in bright clarity.
I thought of my friend’s dad again. What was running through his mind as he was making his way home from that party? Did he feel joy as his life flashed before him? What was he holding onto as he gripped the steering wheel and the handbrake? We will never know. It was THE death, the END that we all dread and fear.
What I now know is the darkness descended in the lives of the ones he left behind - a wife, children and a grandchild. The loss of a father cloaked the family in deep sorrow and grief. And it reverberated in the community, even thousands of miles, across oceans into my Texas home.
Definitely not now, but one day, some day soon, the darkness will rescind and through the cracks, the light will shine. After death comes life, after the darkness light.