Death and a theory of the soul

Maybe it's just a matter of the long hours I have started to spend at work, but I'm starting to feel like I've lost track of some core element of myself. It's been slow in developing, so it could even be something more akin to "this is what getting older feels like". The feeling hovered over my shoulder for the last two weeks; it's only tonight that I feel some notion as to what it is.

This summer I realized that it had been four years since I had graduated from college. Just as much of my life had passed in a world that wasn't what I considered truly formative years as had passed while I was in them. Then I had no idea what I was doing and wasn't particularly inclined to figure it out. I got by. But I did make mistakes, and those led to more. From there it's easy enough to track that downward spiral to my own little brush with falling between the cracks. Recovering from that has taken me nearly three years, and that's not really finished yet.

Was it then? Did I lose it back there, and get by on animal instinct for years only to discover it when I finally have some room to breathe again? It's possible that it has gone on longer than that.

What is it? This feeling may have begun with a shockingly morbid conversation with coworkers right about two weeks ago. I found myself disturbed for a day or two afterward, and that kind of thought process could have worked itself into my background processing. We talked about death. We talked about ideal circumstances in which to die. We considered many forms of suicide out loud and theoretically, trying to discover what would be best. It shouldn't be hard for you to imagine then, that that should be a disturbing topic to ponder. Or maybe it is; I seem to have plenty of friends and acquaintances who will say that they don't fear death. They tell me they like to sleep. I find myself staying up a little later that night.

So it was two weeks ago or so, and I was thinking about death. I think I can say for sure that it was the first time I really felt the weight of my own mortality press on me. In the past I have felt myself aware of my non-immortality, but I have never really considered my own death so directly and with such certainty. Imagining how to angle one's head to ensure "instantaneous" loss of nerve function after going skydiving and purposefully not pulling the chute took up a big part of my thinking. Is it different from falling asleep? I think I believe that life is a series of moments of consciousness given a kind of continuity by our memory and ability to abstract the existence of a future from it. So long as severe pain is avoided...

Being uploaded digitally has been mentioned as a kind of immortality to me before. It doesn't comfort me much to know that some digital construct of me will continue after my meat body perishes, no matter how exactly it mimics it. The self of memory succession born from consciousness will die some day, regardless, and I am it and will die then. The other me that isn't me will continue and remember up to whatever save state my 'brain' was in at the time. Sleeping is similar, however. Again, the problem there is the bump in the road. I go to sleep tonight and my body wakes up tomorrow and it as if tonight's me has died and tomorrow's me has been born. But the succession of memories for the body is me, not the memories themselves. Those can be put anywhere. Once the body dies, the succession stops and that's it. Yoda (and I instantly lose all credibility now that I have brought in a Star Wars quote) is profound when he says "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter." He has managed to say exactly the opposite of the truth. The matter is the matter; we are our bodies. To say otherwise is to have some other conception of what life is than the succession theory I am purporting here.

That succession has to be in the same place. If it branches along the way, then it's an entirely new being being born. One branch is still stuck on its own path toward oblivion and that grouping of successions can't go somewhere else. Coming to that conclusion as part of the discussion of ideal death circumstances was not only the imposition but the execution of a death sentence. I am going to die. That's heavy stuff for a Tuesday evening when you went downstairs with some coworkers to enjoy a beer or four.

One of the benefits I have routinely found from the process of writing is the way I do end up discovering things. For example, when I started writing this, I legitimately was wondering to myself what I was feeling and why. It was as I was writing that I dredged up this memory and tried working it over a bit. I had thought some of those things at the time, but I had not set them to words and organized them until now. The shift of tone as I ask questions and arrive at statements should corroborate my story here, in case you think I am trying to unreliable narrator you.

Speaking of which, I have concluded that thoughts of death have colored my thoughts lately. But how does that answer my question? Is a realization of the certainty of death

I saw him die. I watched. I kept my eyes open and commanded that they absorb what was in front of me. It wasn't long after I came close to bottoming out or dying myself, about five months. I had been so wrapped up in getting my shit together, so wrapped up in not paying attention to the increasingly worrying signals from my sister and my father's sister that things were bad for him, so wrapped up still in running away from all the things I didn't want to deal with after I had to leave school. Getting by was good enough as long as I didn't think too much. Hearing my aunt or my sister talk about him was good enough if I didn't listen. I wasn't ready for him to die. He had so much to answer for, and I owed him answers as well. He asked me why I had abandoned him and I didn't even know the answer. I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted him to know who I was and I wanted to know who he was. Instead I got years of estrangement followed by a sudden deathbed phone call. Looking back on it is as if he died then after that phone call, and not when I was there watching his breathing slow and hearing why it's called a death rattle. He wasn't really conscious by the time I got to that hospital

I left the room. I ran away from him when he was dying - not even hours before he died. There were so many people there I didn't know and didn't trust. I didn't know why they were there. I wanted to see him alone before he died but I didn't get the chance with all those vultures roosting there in his room. It wouldn't have been productive - he wasn't really conscious at that point and couldn't really talk. In my head I imagined I would be there for a few days and that there would be time to sit in the room alone with him and just talk at him. Instead he died right then, in the same afternoon that I flew in after a storm delay in Chicago. Even on the day he died, I was running away, and he was dying too quickly.

I had to settle for his corpse and not his succession of memories. It was only then that I got to be alone with him, father and son. Only after he died that the rest of those onlookers would clear the damn room. They probably knew he wasn't going to make it. I hadn't let myself think that. His flesh was cool to the touch at that point. I thought about punching him, hard. The variety of things sticking out of his torso made my imagined body blow seem likely to be messy though, and other locations didn't offer the same visceral sensation. I settled for settling my hand on his head. I don't remember now which one. I apologized for not knowing how to answer his last question, and for taking his son away from him. I was struck at the time that my own feeling of a lack of a father was probably a feeling he had reciprocated toward me and I felt selfish and small for being so spiteful. I cried again. I tried not to take too long because others were waiting, either for their turn or to leave.

Part of the attraction to me of writing is being able to practice my l'esprit de l'escalier, to act as if I could go back and replace my fumbling and missed steps with the most economical of phrases and assured actions. I wasn't able then to say what I needed to say, and even now I am only just beginning to get to a point where I feel like I know a rough outline of what I would have preferred to say. I've said that I liked the idea of an owe list, and now I see that it's both a matter of owing to something else and a matter of owing myself a better response to the things that I think are important than I think I gave. I owed him an answer as much as I owed myself the memory of answering.