The cynic says there is no God but death, the children of God say there is no death in God, but nobody knows what the dead man says. How useful is the concept of God if there is no death? I suspect that it won’t hold such irresistible potency. Minus the crux, it has the makings of 1970s type capitalist scam: manufacture a solution then invent a problem for it.
There is one truth from which other truths arise: We are all born to die. (No, I am not talking about Lana Del Rey). Let me explain, our purpose for living is dying, so the meaning of your life is what you believe about your death. Will you be translated to glory or will everlasting darkness embrace you? Will it be an in-between thing like reincarnation? A pity you have to die to find out. No matter how we see it, existence is cursed if you have to wait until the end to find its meaning or lack thereof. And what do we do during the wait? Suffer from consciousness, suffer from ourselves and suffer from each other
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death — ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return, […]
James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross,” in The Fire Next Time.
James Baldwin may have stretched it with that thing about rejoicing. The certitude of my death does not make me rejoice, why should it? Instead, during times of unbearable pain, I want to bring my death forward, what’s the point of suffering all these to just end up dead in the end? But we are still here, why? Hope, that bastard thing, a virus in a lush field of existential gloom, it is the antithesis of death. What is the object of hope? Some people live for love, in expectation of it; some for the glory of men, a few others stick around hoping to be finally worthy of themselves.
We watch others reach their ends while waiting for ours. There are many ways to die: alone and lonely, surrounded by family, abruptly without planning, awkwardly with a mouthful of fear. Death becomes a part of our living, we speculate on what comes after it and create rites to soothe our fear, the fear of our own deaths, the fear of the unimaginable thing that comes after. The best minds have failed to say with certainty, what comes after. We fear getting completely erased from consciousness so we form bonds, families, dynasties, empires. We honour the dead to honour ourselves, when we remember them, we remember ourselves. Ancestors, ghosts, spirits, heavenly bodies, we find names and roles for them so we may secure them for ourselves when we pass. If they do not fade, perhaps, we too will not fade.
Fecund: A word for dying, rich things dying
I remember watching a fight between government employed touts as a child, maybe nine years old. These touts sold tickets to Okada riders for riding through their territory. It was a busy junction so they made a lot of money daily. They were menacing figures exuding violence, it was the nature of their job, but they were very sweet, they usually skipped Okadas with school children, many a time I saw one of them roughen a man for trying to assault a young woman and they always helped me across the road on my way to church. I don’t know why they fought but their fights were seasonal, around elections and everybody knew to avoid the roads at a certain time, that junction was a major battle theatre. One day I watched them fight, they first announced with gunshots so commuters and market sellers cleared the road, then they produced knives, machetes, jagged metals, beer bottles and every dangerous implement and fought like their lives depended on it, of course it did. While I watched from the church window upstairs, I saw one man I knew, he always greeted my dad when he drove past. He was fighting a strange man and soon lay on the ground by the side of the gutter, bleeding from the head, the mouth and the lower abdomen. Did he chuckle or groan? I can’t remember, I watched life leak out of him into the gutter. I watched them die and new ones take up their places only to die in turn. Death begets death begets death begets…
I don’t remember the year but I was still a child and I was walking with my dad on a windy night, he was just discharged from the hospital and he was weak and unsteady on his feet as we walked the familiar streets, a man stopped us to greet him, pleasantries were still being exchanged as a car shot out of darkness and threw the man high in the air, he was dead before I got to him.
There was a shootout on our way to the hospital, we were oblivious until we saw the police van full of stacked bloody bodies pull up beside us outside the hospital gates, I looked at the faces of the men, their eyes were not yet shut, one man who looked like he sold cooking gas looked at me, his hand dangled outside the as if he was waving, the adults tried to shield my eyes when they remembered themselves and I let them, the image burned itself into memory.
I can keep writing about death, even the ones I didn’t see. The security of the house beside ours at the beginning of lockdown. His name was Ali, everybody agreed he was good-looking, quiet and polite. He was not long out of boyhood. He was hacked to death because some people wanted to steal a motorcycle. It was 3 am and I was awake, I heard nothing.
Death is very stupid. Martyrdom is not less a death than suicide. Dying for a truth, dying for glory still means you are deader than rusted metal in a junkyard.
There’s a great deal of literature out there that talks about dying in this eloquent way, but when death comes all wisdom is lost. All the things you thought you knew disappears, even when the death is inevitable.
Death is an affliction of the living not the dead.
My neighbour died some days ago. The news came in and settled in the morning air. There was a slight chill like it was harmattan just for a moment and then it passed. He went to buy fuel and was on his way back when he died. He packed by the roadside and turned off the car and died with the air conditioner on. He was nice to everyone around and out of earshot, that’s how I knew he called himself a gangster and how I learnt of his admiration of my ways, my nightly runs and my silences . There was an opening big enough for him to slip through and the world closed back up and kept running.
