The Question

A child asked Walt Whitman, what is the grass? Mine asks me, what is death? An abyss stretches out— cavernous, a barren blankness. What happens after we die? Do we turn to dirt? Whitman wrote, How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. If I give an assured answer, confident and comforting, the insincerity in my voice reveals itself. His gaze steadfast on my face, unrelenting. How long have our minds considered this question? Before we were even fully human. Now, in the comfort of carpeted rooms, in spaces of wood and stone men give sermons, make speeches, we narrate this question through stories, have contrived complex theories, dogmas, we categorize ourselves by our responses to it, we frame it in a thousand ways to ourselves, cut it and parse it, its slivered edges smoothed, its immensity cropped and shaped into neat squares, digestible, repeated to ourselves in mantra, in prayer. Yet, the answer is unknown to us. A mystery, still. This mystery makes our bones ache, disturbs our sleep. Or, perhaps not. Not during our youth, at least. Not until the body begins to age, until the cliff approaches, until we feel the black beast breathing in the night at the nape of our necks, does it interrupt our dreams in a sudden shock of sweat, tangy, sour with fear. How can we know? A chasm separates the living and the dead— the masses of men, of generations who live beneath us, the silent ones whose collective memory haunts our minds who have constructed the world where we—the living—now reside, our fresh bodies, our new bodies, the yet un-dead, ignorant, suffering, yet animate— a veil separates us, like a sea between two continents, foreigners who shall never speak each other’s tongue. So I can only answer him what my eyes see: Yes, our flesh, like all flesh, flower, leaf, wood, bone, decays to dirt. Loses its shape, reduced to its most elemental forms— its molecules, becoming indistinguishable from soil, from ash, from air, from the waters that glide over the earth, seep to its center, pool at its edges. Our flesh joins them, melds with soil and water, loses its particularity of form, becomes universal, inseparable from the whole. Becomes the ground for new life to emerge, for the seed to take root. Some distinguish between flesh and soul. We like things in pairs, in opposites, our little dichotomies, frustrating but familiar. Perhaps because our own bodies are cleaved in two, we reside perpetually in a world divided. Are minds not embedded in flesh? What of our thoughts, our millions of pebbles of worries, phobias, to do lists, mundane ruminations, our desires, our lusts, our terrors, our beautiful and original ideas, sensations, memories? The memories of our lived lives encased in the glass bottle of our fragile form? Are they released when it shatters, scattering to the ocean bed? Sinking in mud? Evaporating into cloud? Do our minds crack open, releasing into the world? Suddenly, gradually? No longer separate, disintegrating into earth and air? Are they relieved to be cradled in the eternally rocking ocean? Released like a kestrel in the winds—breathless, hollow, sailing above cloud and river? Are we solitary pieces of the world, kept temporarily separate from it, suffering in our lonely forms? And with death’s release, is there relief in the dissipation of our boundaries, no more skin to divide us, a blurring of borders? Simply one of a billion waves in the ocean, striking out on its own for a moment and forgetting its true nature, then returning again? Can there be joy when we no longer have a name? What is the mind, and what are our thoughts? Our emotions that color them? From whence do they originate? And where do they go, after that last gasp? We are beings that came from the earth, were formed from it. Mustn’t we return to it? No, finally I don’t even know that. Do our distinctions between earth and heaven, heaven and hell, animate and inanimate, alive or dead, me and not me, the mundane and paradise collapse becoming endowed with sacredness? As beloved unites with beloved, as the child who runs, returning to the comfort of his mother’s lap? Do we suddenly break open from that narrowness imposed by form, our perspective widening to encompass it all, bursting open in a monumental embrace? Does the world think, then? Is there an elemental mind, interwoven with all things? An energy, a spirit in earth’s background? Isn’t this the sacredness we feel when our bodies hover under the restless trees, when our feet ponder velvet moss, when our gaze lingers upon the horizon, permeated by the green seas, when stars draw us up into the dark, cavernous depth of universe? We count our five senses, but isn’t mind, like a curtain behind our senses, thick, impenetrable, just beyond our reach? Is consciousness experienced by all earthy things, but differently? A stone stands solemn and vibrates, the rooted pine dances, the ocean twists and undulates with life. Are they not all alive?

Am I not a leaf, a branch on the broader tree of life? Does a leaf know it is just part of the living tree? Or does it name itself and think of itself only as a leaf? Heartbroken, with its pain, its complexes, its own memory? When the chatter from our mouths clears away, the vibrations can be felt, when we relieve ourselves of the prison of four walls, we feel to be part of something vibrating, vastly alive and moving, bursting with wet energy, not a void or nothingness, but a sacred somethingness in our background, underneath us, above, yearning to join our insides, water to meld with blood, flesh with soil, breath with air, our beating hearts with fire. The world animated. And if we stop moving, talking, thinking, finally there may be comfort there for our sad, sick, frenzied minds. We may find comfort there.

But you, my little one, how can I tell you all this? How can I answer you with my own questions? My thousands of questions? I realize too late that you only need me to take away your fear, to make you safe, to give you comfort. And when we reach our deathbeds, won’t we need the same? So, I say, in a pre-packaged response: We go to heaven, where we live forever with God. Perhaps this is true, but not the way we think. In Whitman’s words: The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.