Imagine Your Death
Nepantla Realism
Memory tells me that Rilke wrote a line like, God grant us the grace to choose our own deaths. I know I could google or GPT it, but I don’t want to. I want to savor the line and imagine that it comes from Rilke.
I want to choose my own death. At least to choose where I was heading in life when I die. In a literary narrative, the ending embeds the meaning of the story, and the same is somewhat true with a human life. [1] Obviously, randomness will appear in our lives, and someone will get hit by a car or murdered in a drive by, and although the ending may encode a slice of who they were at the end of their life, shit happens. People die in unexpected ways that may have nothing to do with how they lived.
But to choose your own death, as Rilke may have written, is to create the ending of your own story, the way you want your life to be remembered. If family and community is the most important to me, I would imagine a death wherein I am very old and surrounded by family, my adult children, my wrinkled wife –all my loved ones. They’re laying hands on me as I take my last breaths.
This is a radical idea, and I don’t yet have the science to back it up nor am I sure where it fits into Mystic tradition, but I’m confident that it can be explained both scientifically and spiritually: If you imagine your own death, if you picture it – close your eyes and actually feel that you are there watching your death –you can look around the scene and notice the details. When I’m on my death bed around family, I see bookshelves, some of them have my books. I see a window, and through the glass I see a sea, and there are sailboats in the distant. It’s a beautiful day. I see wrinkled old me on that bed, and because I am THERE, I can whisper into the ear of the me who is about to die and I can whisper, I love you.
Or, Your life had meaning.
Or, Thank you.
Whatever I want to tell myself.
And years later, when I’m actually dying –even if it’s not the exact picture I had of death–in the future, even if I don’t remember my death fantasy, even if the neurons don’t spark right before I’m dying, my spirit remembers. My physiology remembers. We have a memory archive that is written forever, the mystics will tell. Your sprit remembers everything, even if you forget. The neuroscientists will tell you that memory is encoded into your brain and body, and even if you never light up those dark neurons, there are there; and if you would believe some scientists, you might even say and these forgotten memories influence your decisions, although you’re not conscious of it.
If you imagine your own death, you can communicate with future versions of yourself. Yes, it’s imagination, those realms that you reach during Flow and the Writers High, and they are just as real as any other conscious state. Imagine a younger or older or any version of you, and you can communicate with yourself. Make it a practice to visit not only future you on your deathbed, but versions of you throughout your life, all ages. Enter into memories of younger you and interact with yourself.
When Jesus tries to expel a demon from a man who lived in the tombs, and he asks the demon, Who are you?
The demon answers, I am Legion. I am many.
This was a neuro-divergent man living in the tombs, and he used to carve his flesh with stones. Why would he do that? Maybe he was an obsessed writer who wanted to create something that would last. Nonetheless, he was considered crazy by everyone and back then, the metaphor for being crazy was to be “possessed by a demon.” His demon was Legion.
Every one of us is “many.”
We could look at that physics metaphor that every seven years all the molecules inside if you have been renewed, and you aren’t even the same person. We could think about who we were when we were young and the things we did that we wouldn’t do at any other time. The other day I was taking my daughter to school and I saw a young man probably late for class jump over a 6 foot chain-link fence in one smooth motion and landing on his feet. I remember when I could do that.
Those other versions of me share other versions of my body, from birth to death, and they carry my legal identtity, but they are different people. The story of me, the story my prefrontal cortex tells me changes not only from decade to decade, year to year, but moment to moment.
If we are all “many,” we can imagine a meeting with different versions of ourselves. We can preside over a committee meeting, and say to the various versions of us, Welcome everybody! Let’s reflect on our life. What meaning do we want?
Seven you old you raises a hand. Oh! Oh! I know!
Call on that kid.
Maybe if seven-year-old me was in a meeting with other versions of me, he would say, Let’s us have fun!
And maybe we can turn that boring old committee into a party, celebrate the different lives we are leading.
I would love to have a conversation with 19-year-old me, long hair stoner who used to ponder pothead questions, like what if our entire universe was just some speck of dust in a bigger world, like in Horton Hears a Who?
You still want that Chevy Nova? I’d ask him, knowing that from 15 to 17 that’s the car I dreamed of having.
Did I ever get it? he might ask, but instead of telling him No, I’d say something like, Even better than a Nova!
In spite of my reluctance to look up the Rilke quote, while I was doing research for this, it found me. Rilke wanted me to set the record straight. What he actually wrote was this:
O Lord, give each person their own death.
Their own death. No matter how “many” they there are, all the different versions of us die the same way.
[1] just now a new neuron sparked: I was a little kid –maybe second or third grade– and the teacher was talking or students were doing their work. I daydreaming, of which I did a lot in class, imagining some possible world. If you had seen me in class, you might think I looked dumb, like I didn’t get anything, but I was lost in the imaginal realms. I was so lost I had to repeat third grade twice. In the memory I was imagining my death. I’m a little embarrassed to give details of my fantasy, but it was like a dramatic ending from a corny movie where the hero is shot by cops or the evil authorities, and the regular people are so angry that they rise up
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