A Matter of Life & Death

        I'd rather die fast than ever live slow
            --Melissa Etheridge, The Shadow of a Black Crow

The great thing about depression is that it takes away your fear of death.

In the heart of winter, living just  half a degree latitude below Canada, it's dark when I go to work, often damp and gray all day, then at 4:00 P.M., it starts to get dark again.

During my first couple of winters on San Juan Island, I couldn't understand why darkness kept gathering inside my head. At times even trivial problems and setbacks made my life feel almost hopeless. I was never  suicidal, but if the grim reaper had walked into my library, on some evenings I'd have offered him a comfy chair and a brandy.

Luckily, a friend recognized what was going on and, with light therapy, exercise, vitamin D and meditation, winter depression is now little more than a nuisance. But the darkness did leave me a gift: the ability to think more dispassionately about death. And on reflection, the distinction between life and death doesn't seem as simple as it once did.

People who do data processing are familiar with a concept called fuzzy logic. They use it to make sense out of things that don't fall into neat categories. Is an apple with a bite out of it still an apple? Perhaps so, but at some point, as it is being eaten, the apple ceases to be an apple. Fuzzy logic provides a system to estimate how much appleness exists at any point in the transition; so if your challenge is to report how many apples there are in a room where people are eating apples, fuzzy logic can help you come up with an answer.

Applying fuzzy logic to human life, one might define a 100% live human being as a self-aware creature, capable of locomotion, taking care of its basic needs, rational thought, and understanding and communicating abstract ideas. Using that definition, a new-born baby would score fairly low for humanness, but most will progress to perfect, or near-perfect scores within a few years.

At the other end of life, the humanizing process starts to reverse itself, and we start shedding those human characteristics, often one by one.

Franchised “retirement communities” apply their own brand of fuzzy logic to the aging marketplace, promising to take care of us in the most appropriate surroundings as we go from a time when our needs are primarily for golfing and bridge partners until, at the end, the time when we need a safe environment where our physical creature can survive, while our essential humanity –  ability to understand, communicate and care for ourselves – fades away.

A couple of thousand years ago, the Stoic Philosopher Seneca, contemplated his own impending suicide and proclaimed: “A wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can.”

I choose to believe that a wise man will keep living until he can't truly be alive. If we linger on the fact that the light is fading, we squander the light that remains.

Hope is the light in our lives and fear the darkness. The statement, “Where there's life, there's hope,” raises the question: “Does life continue after all hope is gone?”  Some people radiate hope, others are so afraid of losing it, they they are afraid to use it.

I recently found a great on-street parking space while visiting Northwest Portland. It's right in front of where I was staying and there is no meter or time limit. It's a parking space of such amazing quality and convenience that most mortals will not find such a place in a lifetime. Once I possessed it, my inclination was to not move my car during the whole visit, because if I used the car, I'd lose this incredible space. I actually walked, in the rain, to a couple of places I might have been inclined to drive to because I was afraid of losing my great parking space. For all the good it did me, my car might as well have been impounded.

My own fear in life is not that death will come and take me; it's that I'll park my hopes and aspirations somewhere safe and comfortable until it's too late to set them out on a new adventure.

At funerals I find that my emotions correspond to the amount of life the guest of honor still had when death came. When someone filled with life and hope dies, a light goes out of our lives. But there is only relief when a heart stops beating inside a body whose humanity had long since departed.

My own hope is that when the final words are spoken over my ashes, my loved ones will be able to follow Dr. Seuss's advice: “Don't cry because it's over,” he said. “Smile because it happened.”