Mortal Signs

No matter what the investigators of Vice.com felt, I find it no surprise that Goths show the same sort of variation in their attitudes to the fact of death as everyone else, something that Goths themselves are probably quite surprised by too. Decorating yourself in the signifiers of death doesn’t imply any particular view of it, or even, I fear, any greater-than-average willingness to confront its reality.

I was going to write a blog post about that article some time ago, but realised it was probably going to come close to the anniversary of my operation last year, which in fact falls today. It was, you remember, nothing drastic, but still the first time I’d had a general anaesthetic, and who knows what might have happened. As I’ve aged and drawn almost definitely closer to the end of my life than the beginning, death has become less a philosophical presence in it, and has come more into focus, somewhere towards the bottom of the hill below my house, slowly and unhurriedly making its way in my direction. I’ve thought more about the process of it, the events that will throw me out of this world, whether it will be painful, or whether I will know anything about it at all. It boggles me, even if it shouldn’t, that the two experiences all human beings share, coming into existence and leaving it, are the two we are utterly ignorant about. I know when I am dreaming; will ceasing to dream be something I am aware of? Will I feel the pity of it, that my unique collection of mental nonsense will (so far as this world is concerned) be coming to an end? Will I panic? How will I react? Or will it be like the utter blank of the anaesthetic sleep? Nobody can give anyone clues.

I told the congregation today this. I have lived a mainly happy life, and I have very little to complain about. Untold myriads of human beings have not been so fortunate, and should I ever be tempted to despair it does me good to think about them, and to ask myself why I imagine I deserve anything different. The vast and uncountable mass of human souls have lived and died and left not a trace behind them, many of them not even in their descendants because they died before having a chance to produce any. The ways in which human beings can be suddenly and with barely a moment’s warning thrown out of this life are so many and various they boggle the mind. Three people died in an accident today on the M4, the news might say, four were shot dead during protests in the Palestinian territories, seventeen died in a fire in a nightclub in Rio de Janeiro, the death toll in the outbreak of ebola in West Africa reaches 11,000. In 2004 my predecessor in Swanvale Halt organised the church in helping the relief effort after the Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean, a single event which killed 228,000 people in a few hours. So many souls, wiped away so fast. Why should I expect any greater fairness than they got? And in that I find some strange comfort, and even courage.