How to learn to die
listening to here and now and warding off the big fear of leaving no trace
Horace told it in one verse: seize the day.
Then, they made a movie of it, …oh, my captain, my captain
….an ode to life.
They told you how to live in plenitude.
From then on the true meaning of that verse lost its birth distinctive colour.
Seize the day is a recipe to learn how to die, starting from its precise contrary: life.
Seize the day means to understand our existence as human beings in the moment it is happening, if we want to read Horace thorough the glasses of Heidegger.
Or, being mindful to avoid death, glorifying life, if we want to stay in line with our times.
But how can you leanr to die? Or better, to prepare you to that imponderable event, considering that nobody knows when it will happen, how it will happen and with whom?
One word evoking another recipe: euthanasia. A way to exorcise death, becoming a kind of masters of it.
The ratio is: I am the master of my life because I am the master of my death. Period.
In a manner more sweetened, then, there is the testament: the shipment to posterity of our wills. The sing that a writing ink and the assent of a checked notary are still our vestige, a fleeting one, because
the moment when a testament or a post mortem letter will be opened, we will have crossed yet the Pillars of Hercules of our personal existing.
How do we learn to die, then?
Faith, trusting to an outrageously merciful God who is welcoming. Who is giving, again and again, a chance to our inability to love to the bottom.
And if this is not enough, there is another kind of faith helping to die, to design the supreme detachment from everything we can touch, feel, smell, bite, taste. From life, in other words.
This kind of faith is trusting in what we can do through our deeds, our personality, our conviction of becoming better humans.
An example:
after a day of exhausting hot, I make sure to reach out what would have given me relief and, above all, would have given joy to a person younger than me.
Holding hands, we plunged into the sea, as into an opalescent and ancestral placenta.
There, I washed away the languor of the day and I gave joy. And I thought I could die that same night, aware of having given love, beyond myself.
How learn to die?
Steering into life in the one time we, maybe, posses: the present.
And if this does not happen, know that nobody knows how to do it. Or better, everyone knows how to do it his way.
After all even when we die, nobody dies really and at all.
Memory compensates detachment.
Awareness compensates resignation towards a known end.
We can just change how to get there.
