Making Death a Part of Life

Me: “Wait! Doesn’t death mean the end of life!?”
Neptune: “It depends on how you define life.”

I have discovered that death is an amazing life partner who helps me create another level of meaning in “life.” In this brief reflection, I’ll share a few things about my daily dance with death in case it helps you reframe some of the ideas you live with.

Life and Death

Most of us grow up with clear cut definitions about what we regard as “life” and “death.” In cultures like the USA, we avoid talking about death as much as possible. Death is one of our cultural shadows. Conversely, in Slavic cultures I’ve experienced, death is more integrated into life. When someone dies, family members and friends often visit the person’s grave quite regularly, and they talk to their dear one. Their relationship to their “departed” does not end when s/he is in the grave.

I also encountered a different relationship with death in several pieces of French literature I studied in undergrad. In these, death is in the room, in relationship to the main personnages of the piece.

As I have “advanced” in years, I have naturally pondered death because the pressure of its presence keeps increasing.

I have Saturn in rulership in the 12th and a prominent Pluto, so one of their effects is that I am very deliberate and relentless about confronting repressions. My ego is as determined as anyone’s, but I often catch him when he’s trying to avoid things that make him feel uncomfortable; here, that means vulnerability to death. As I live alone and value self-sufficiency, I am confronted with my physical vulnerability after bike crashes, illnesses, and other signs of my mortality.

Death and Life

One day the light bulb went off. It hit me that my death was a certainty, so why not embrace its eventuality? This precipitated the Life and Death post. This legerdemain is really the result of a conversation between Ego and Unconscious, or, more likely, Self.

When Ego accepted death, I lost a huge portion of my fears. I sense that many of my fears really tied back to Ego’s fear of death. Once this happened, I felt incredibly light and free. Because I got to live before I died.

A huge part of accepting death for me is living as if each day were my last. I try to take care of things, so if I die today, I won’t have any regrets of import. Since I will die, don’t leave anything undone.

Now, death is at my table, it is my companion. It is not some overpowering force that will swallow me up; it is my companion, my Doppelganger. My Harvey. I know that we will exchange places one day, that he will become my representative in the incarnated world, and I will become him, maybe even for some other incarnated person.

I can also ask death questions, but Ego doesn’t speak its language, so we must ask Unconscious or Self to be intermediary. It will answer through dreams, as least that is how it works for me at present.

I can also live as death now. I can put myself into a Neptunian space from which I can experience the earthly world in a detached way. I can observe and interact with a special awareness, a detached awareness that everything is as it is. Since I bike everywhere in a major city, death passes by me, dodges me, crosses me, constantly. I know that this ride could be my last. I’m grateful when I reach my destination unscathed. I can observe, feel happy, sad, whatever, but I can change little. And that is okay because things are the way they need to be right now, and they will change when the time is right. This is a very freeing way to be in the earthly layer.

Living as if I am dead enables me to love my incarnated life even more, so life and death enrich each other. What do you think?