My cousin died a few weeks ago. He was 27. His name was Jacob. I hadn't seen him in many, many years, and we weren't really close because I'm not close to many people, but we grew up together as much as I grew up with anyone in my family and I always thought I'd see him again. I think we probably had a lot in common and sometimes when you have too much in common with someone, your commonalities keep you apart. We both left home in search of bigger worlds. I think we were both drifters, to an extent. We're both creative. Both introverts. But he was just moreso than me; me magnified times ten. He moved to New York to pursue his dreams of becoming a musician and when that didn't work out, he moved to the remote Toledo District of Belize and lived as a sea fisherman and drum teacher. He'd been teaching at the Maroon Creole Drum School, which seems like a pretty good thing to be doing, and riding his bike somewhere when a driver hit him with their car. He died instantly, just like that.
His mom worried about him being so far away, in a place so remote, but I admired him for that, for having the balls it takes to live life according to your own rules and your own dreams and to shun the uncertainty and doubt that must have crept in there when it came time to leave the things he'd known, the people he'd known, the life he'd known. It might not be heroic, but it's courageous.
I've had a lot of views on life and death in my lifetime. They change sometimes, rippling like water. I grew up Catholic, believing in Heaven and Hell and Jesus saving us from our sins, and I believed that for a long time, even when I stopped going to church in college and even as my political and social beliefs and my interpretation of scripture carried me further and further from organized religion. But one day I just woke up and realized those beliefs didn't make any sense to me anymore. They were too limiting. Too inconsistent. Too corrupted. An all-powerful judge who creates Heaven and Earth and all its creatures but refuses to show himself afterward and prefers instead to judge who is good and who is evil in a world where nothing is fair, where good and evil — with the exception of extreme cases — are just perspectives and perception?
Now I don't believe in Heaven and Hell, but I don't believe in Death, either. There is absolutely no evidence of a nothingness, no evidence of Death.
I believe in cycles. I believe in rebirth and resurrection. I believe we live to become more connected in death. We live to die. Again and again and again. Everywhere around us the things that live and die live again. Death brings new life. We are all energy. I believe in something I'll say is a Higher Power, a single connectedness, something that we all feel when we die and something that we all leave to live because we must. And I don't mean we as in the people we, as in humanity we, but we as in every living thing, here and elsewhere.
A friend of mine told me once that he preferred to believe in the "nothing" version of death because it places more significance, more importance, on this life if there is only one shot at it, if this is all we get. But I think life is significant no matter what it winds up being, whether it's the only chance we'll ever have to experience this somethingness in the universe that is within the grasps of our senses or whether it's just four levels up from being subatomic in a world of infinite levels where the subatomic and atomic know each other in the way that we wish we could know our own atoms and our own stars. Is that weird?
Death and time are tied. How do you have death without time? We don't understand or comprehend either one. We think we do. We perceive that we do. But there is so much more in this world than what we perceive. At least we have some theory to time. At least we are beginning to understand it doesn't exist the way we think it does.
Time is a library of infinite pages, of every book ever written or that ever could be written, every sentence ever spoken or that could be spoken, every feeling ever felt or that could be felt. We read time in a line, character by character, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, but time is not a book and it does not have to be read in a line. It can be read by jumping from this word on page 31 of this book to that word on page 190192 of that book, and that, too would be a story of time. Time is not fate. Time is every possible past and every possible future and every possibility strung together in story, in life.
Maybe.
That brings us back to death, and the grief we feel and the fears we have because of it. The things we do to avoid it. The heartache that becomes us when we lose someone we love. The way we might run to it as a way out when we can't go on living, when we haven't been living. The need to create this idea of nothingness.
The idea that nothingness can exist in a universe where everything can be broken down into smaller and smaller and smaller particles and larger and larger and larger and larger systems doesn't make any sense. It's close-minded and absurd.
So I'll miss you, Jake. I'm sorry we weren't closer, that I didn't get to know you better, that I always believed in tomorrow and in the next time. I'm sad you didn't get to live more of your dreams in this life. I think of the opportunities we missed to connect with each other, though I can't regret who we both are and the choices we made. We were family and I believe we both understand what that means, what it meant. I'm still grieving the end of your life, how a light can shine so brightly and be gone so suddenly. But I will not grieve your death. I'll be there, too, eventually.