We put on ocean sounds. It was a setting on my Grandpa’s alarm clock. I had never known him to be particularly fond of the beach, but he kept asking for it.
He lived in the California desert and it was 110 degrees outside. All the blinds were drawn and the air conditioner was on. He kept tilting his head toward the closed window, saying, “I can feel the breeze.”
Our silence in response to this misinterpretation was instinctual. We didn’t want to correct him, but we didn’t want to condescend to his fading awareness by agreeing, either. So we didn’t speak to it. Anyway, who were we to say where he was?
We weren’t very close, but I loved him. He had a strong personality. The love came naturally, but the liking was harder to cultivate. He was in denial about his approaching demise, which surprised my family, because he was a minister, and a good one. He’d often wax for hours on the nature of death. On the existential fear that he felt unknowingly colored the actions of his various parishioners. He had dealt with so many dying people in his life, had sat by so many bedsides, and here we were at his - but he wasn’t able to admit it.
Sometimes he was angry, and even mean. Sometimes he was pensive, or complimentary. Sometimes he was like a child. Complaining that there weren’t enough ice cubes in his drink, or upset that we were scratching his foot in the wrong place. He was many different people in those last days.
Should it have surprised us? You can witness death without confronting your own.
My Grandpa was an academic. He held a PhD in Theology. He was concerned about who would read the notes he had written into his thousands of books. He wanted us to keep them, so that we could see what he’d left in the margins. Though I suppose what he really wanted was to stay.
The air conditioner kept shorting. I must have visited the breaker box a dozen times.
Is death supposed to be glorious? Is it supposed to be beautiful? Was he supposed to change, really? Suddenly become someone else?
He took his pills, he told the same stories, he made no apologies for errors past or present, which he was never prone to doing, so why expect it now? We fed him watermelon, we fed his dogs, we swept the floor, we listened to old tapes of Abbott and Costello. It was mostly as it always was.
And this is what it looks like when a piece of the universe slips away.
If you squint, you can see it. We are sandcastles, temporarily arranged with exquisite detail. Held together with a glue so fragile you could laugh. When the breeze blows past, little grains of us float away.
Ocean sounds. We build our homes and our careers and wash the dishes while the waves beat at our shores - licking our ankles, softy reminding us that the time is coming, approaching, rising. We will get swept away. The things we’ve built will dissolve, quickly. Or slowly. Sometimes very slowly. But dissolve they will. Then, they will be replaced by new things, things our children will build, and all we can do is carry on in the wake of that truth. Let the sand break apart when the time comes. Remember fondly the days we spent confusing it for solid form, astounded by how such delicately arranged fragments could retain their shape with such believable permanence. No amount of grasping can prevent the arrival of the swell. Thank the sand before you go. Allow the pieces to turn into something new — or back into what they always were.
I held his hand and I told him that I understood he was afraid, but he didn’t have to be. He wondered aloud if it was his birthday. He said, “When you were a baby, you were born with black hair, do you remember that?” I told him I remembered the pictures. In a moment of subdued lucidity, he asked if I thought we’d see the ones we love after we pass. He said, “I hope I get to see my mother again. I just want to feel her. Hold her again.”
And then he asked me to help him pee, and told me he wasn’t going to die.
The day before he did, I visited the woods, and through the light and the green I thought about him, and about my own passing. How much time I’ve devoted to the thought to death. The meditations, the psychedelics, the hundreds of releases into ego-crushing voids. Still, this is only practice. Merely a practice; a rehearsal in preparation for the slow dimming of your form from the universal eye - the Large one, the one that blinks you out, sets you loose from your mortal curves. With practice, it’s easy to get comfortable with the idea of death. It’s natural. I’m ready. But it’s not an idea, is it? It’s not a concept we can only engage with for sport. It’s an absolute. In practice - in sitting by bedsides, in Tibetan mantras - the rehearsal is for the performance, and the performance is the last you’ll do. It’s the end of you. Here, now, this version, this. It’s your story being done. The reader of a blog, the baby with the black hair, the woods, the waves, Abbott and Costello.
Why did we expect him to be brave? Will I be?
The next day, I woke up to a message from my Aunt that read, ‘He’s gone.’ I sat with that. The feeling of him being done. Someone dies, someone is born. It’s their birthday, and one day, it won’t be. I visited a park and sat in the grass, mostly in silence. I paid my taxes online. I went out for dinner with some friends. I woke up the next day.
These are the parallel lives we run. The sand we arrange before we go.
(This is a revisiting of an old video essay you can find here, if you’re curious.)