Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. ― Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure
I may die tonight.
My blood may coagulate and clot and slide into some too small canal or crevice to results that mean my end. While taking in the night air the neighborhood bear may mistake me for my trash can and this time turn me over and inside out. Some piece of exploded aircraft or a far foreign meteorite might tunnel through my roof and land on my bed upstairs.
(Tonight does not seem so risky.)
I may die tomorrow. If I take my motorcycle into work again the risk is higher. Someone on their phone may change lanes into me as I pass or rear end me as I stop. I may get overconfident in my abilities and make some fatal mistake myself, hurling into a guardrail or tree or sign with dismembering velocity. A speeding motorcyclist died after striking my great grandfather one evening while he was crossing the street to collect his mail. My great grandfather died that night also, but my mailbox is just at the end of my driveway.
It needn’t be on the motorcycle. I could die in my car. Or on my feet, falling into traffic or falling down the several flights of stairs I take each day. An angry man may punch me. You can die from a single punch if either it or you land wrong. It’s not likely, but it’s far from unprecedented. Violence carries terrible risk. I might have to get punched by the angry man to defend someone else. Then I’d die a hero.
On my first date with my ex-wife we ended up going for drinks after dinner. It was a quiet bar off the beaten path, and not too late out. But there was a very large and very drunk man who had been kicked out earlier and who came back in screaming and threatening and throwing glasses at the two women who were working there alone. I stood up from our table and looked around. There in the bar were two other pairs of women, my date, and me. I recognize the sexism in implying via specifying the parties’ genders that women can’t handle this sort of situation. I don’t mean to. By the time I got to the bar one woman was tip toeing toward the man, knowing she had a moral responsibility to help but being understandably physically afraid of a violent mammal that towered over her. She was brave and present and her courage standing there helped me deescalate the situation as I confronted the man and got him outside peaceably. The bartender locked the doors behind us and called the police.
I could have died that night. Instead I seemed brave and it made a woman think she fell in love with me until a decade later she realized she just wanted to be loved so badly she blinded herself to how she truly felt.
If I don’t die tomorrow, I might die the next day. Our world fractures with violence. It may be more violent than in recent history, and less violent than in bygone eras, I don’t know. The rate of violence and likelihood of death by it is a wonderful number in an article or a paper but matters very little to those impacted. There are almost 4 million fourth graders in the US, which puts the likelihood of any individual fourth grader dying by gun violence at under one thousandth of one percent.
My daughter was in fourth grade last year. Her 10th birthday was the day after Uvalde. After it had happened but before I had heard about it I texted her teacher to ask if we could bring in cupcakes. My ex wife even checked in on me to see how I was handling it. That same 10 year old wasn’t yet 7 months when Sandy Hook happened. That day I came home from work and we all held each other and cried. This time I sat my children down and explained what happened. I don’t want to scare my children, but I don’t want them hearing these things first somewhere else.
My daughters might die tonight. If not tonight, they might die tomorrow. It needn’t be as sensational as a school shooting to have its inevitable effect. And I don’t write it to be macabre or masochistic. It is merely a fact worth confronting.
I lose my patience with them sometimes. I hear this is normal when one parents children, although I’ve only parented them and I live in our modern isolated world, so I have to take it on faith that I’m not a loveless monster.
In every moment I raise my voice unnecessarily I am forgetting the reality of death.
I do not mean to live or parent with no thought to the future. We may conceive of it mathematically as expected value. It is very likely that we will live for many years and we should live as such. We should not eat ice cream for dinner every night. But it is also possible that we may die tomorrow — this next one or any after — and we should also live as such. We should not never eat ice cream for dinner. And I should not forget inevitable death and fight with my kids. If I can calm down a violent man at a bar then I can surely deal with children more calmly in trying moments as well.
But there’s the difficulty in remembering death. I only had to face that man for a few minutes on one evening but I face my children — and coworkers, and boss, and traffic, and ex wife, and parents, and siblings — so much more often. Life happens so often that we become habituated to it.
When a term loses its impact through overuse we label it a cliché. Like in semantic satiation the words seem to mean nothing. The same is true of tired advice. Having heard it so many times we cannot hear it at all. But I think it’s fruitful to pause and reflect on tired advice, clichés, and all other manner of familiar things from time to time.
We take life for granted. Etymologically grant shares roots with guarantee and ultimately with the Latin credere, meaning to trust or to believe. But our belief and trust in life’s guarantee is false. Death will come, and it is its own sort of luck when we see it coming naturally.
But I needn’t wait for that luck to see death coming. Like all holy things it is with me always. I don’t need to know its shape to let it shape me. My death is inevitable — my daughters’ deaths are inevitable — and they will not arrive at a time of my choosing. May I always remember so.