Life's Dullest Fact: Its End
In my hometown of Templeogue stands a pub called the Morgue, fifty meters to its left; Massey brothers funeral home. Separating the two is an off-license, a fast food takeaway and a pharmacy. Drink and eat your way to an early (local) grave. Just another musing about one of the plainest part of life; its end.
And that’s what we do, we project fantasies into life’s dullest facts. Mostly, I would say, because we fear it. What greater poetry can you add to the end of life, than claiming that it isn’t really the end? A fascination with an afterlife is a reasonable way of dealing with the inevitable. Valhalla, nirvana, heaven and hell, fantastic concepts of the beyond. Valhalla would be my personal choice, the hedonism associated with the Islamic faith just doesn’t sound like a good party. Virgins, yes, but virgins don’t really make me think ‘eternal bliss and carnal indulgence’, they make me think ‘sex education talks’ and fingering. An eternity of fingering. Not for me.
Death means differing things for me, as does it for everyone, but I share in the cynical acceptance of the finite. The ‘yolo’ that Christopher Hitchens advocated, not the one Twitter spammed into being. My god, the teen pregnancies and drug overdoes’ that must have been spawned from that in-articulation. ‘The greatest trick the devil ever played, was making people believe he didn’t exist’…and the misappropriation of ‘YOLO’. It seems that’s what happens when you squeeze ‘carpe diem’ into a catch phrase, just small enough to fit in giant letters to a hat...on a fat child’s head.
Death, I believe, should be treated with the same amount of time and energy as the concept of Heaven. A beautiful philosophical drink topic, but not one which should consume our daily lives. What’s out of our reach is merely that, and to throw ones arm to catch it, is to grasp at wisp’s of smoke. Intangible, and pointless, amusing and impossible.
The ritual that we have for death, is for the living. A macabre celebration of that same sadness and fear. I fucking hate funerals, I’ve been to too many. But I appreciate the dictum that’s adopted by the elderly. People who speak candidly about it, “sure isn’t it terrible, poor Johns dead”. The weather is given more weight than death by the elderly because its passive and meaningless to them, its accepted and worried about least. In the short jolt of light between an infinite of darkness, of course the rain matters more. We can feel it, and so it matters most. Checking the freshness of the Brennans bread while making awkward eye contact with shoppers carrying ham in their basket. It must be a thrill, to simply wake up and be alive.