How the End Gives Life to the Means

Note: This post is heavy, but I'm not writing from a negative headspace. It may be triggering for folks who are processing the passing of a loved one or who suffer from depression.

Decades ago, I came across a Kafka quote: "The meaning of life is that it stops."

I'm fortunate to not trend towards depression. Introspection, yes. Skepticism that sometimes cuts towards cynicism, also yes. But not depression or hopelessness.

The upshot is that this quote didn't hit me in a bad way. Quite the opposite: I found and find it motivating. It is because this life ends that every living moment matters.

I recently read Sebastian Junger's In My Time of Dying, and it hit. Hard. Junger processes on the page his own near death experience, approaching the mechanics and timeline of that event with journalistic rigor and the existential questions contained therein with philosophical curiosity.

He writes, “Death annihilates us so completely that we might as well have not lived, but without death, the life we did live would be meaningless because it would never end.” Ah, I thought, there's Kafka's sentiment reborn. "Without death, life does not require focus or courage or choice. Without death, life is just an extraordinary stunt that won’t stop." Yes! And what beauty and purpose to find in that revelation.

I insist in these blog entries that there must be a way to consider a more fulsome version of what it means to get things done, and that there's no way to arrive at that holistic view without true consideration of who we are as people. To be human is to die, someday. So how could we expect to understand our purpose in a macro or micro sense without confronting head on that reality?

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In Junger's literal time of dying, he sensed from his hospital bed a bottomless void drawing him in, and a conjuring of his late father kindly inviting him to enter. As I consumed the book, that portion in particular, I had to keep stopping to process things I didn't know I needed to process.

I was with my father when he took his last breaths in the hospital. After twelve days of occasional, partial consciousness post brain bleed, the doctor told us he was near the end. My mother on one side and I on the other, we held my father's hands as his pulse and rate of breath dropped lower, ever lower. And when he was almost there, his eyes opened wide, mouth agape, and it seemed as if he was doing everything he could to sit up. He stared with intense focus at the ceiling.

My mom knows he saw heaven. I've never known exactly what I think he saw. But Junger's personal account and examination of other near death experiences lead me to believe that my father was seeing an apparition of someone he held dear. Coming to that belief brought me an unexpected dose of comfort, some three years after his actual passing.

I hold my father in the highest regard, and I aspire to be for my own sons what he was for me: a man who loved without restraint. A man who thought critically and helped others do the same. A man of honor.

The meaning of life is that it stops. The actions I take today and tomorrow, no matter how small, add to the sum total of the man I will be on the day I die. What awesome purpose can be found in this realization. What profound meaning.

I do not know if, on the threshold of my passing, I will have a clear moment where I will look to the sky and connect with something or someone from beyond. But I do know that I want to work now to ensure that at my inevitable end, I will feel that my very purpose of being has been satisfied.

That. That is a life well lived. And every single thing I do until then shapes that very life.