On Death

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. Mark Twain.

I put a countdown on my phone.

I have 9563 days, 14651 seconds until my 87^th birthday.

People tell me I’m morbid, and whilst it doesn’t guarantee I’ll live that long, or that I won’t live longer, it does make me appreciate that the clock is ticking. It adds a little sauce to each day.

Once upon a time, in a far-off land I was one of those rockers arrogant enough to imagine I might be eligible for the 27 club. Which left me confused when I hit 28.

Now what?

So, I decided if I wasn’t to die young nor leave a good-looking corpse, I might as well rinse life for every last drop it had to give, and so I settled on 87.

I want to be remembered as the founder of the 87 club.

Death is the new black, if you think about it. Most people are dead. Something like 120 billion humans ever lived. Right now, there’s about 8 billion people alive. That makes you and I…

The minority.

*

It’s funny, this fear of death, because it’s where we’ve all come from, it’s just for some reason we don’t give the darkness before birth the same name. The same weight.

Our Western hostility towards death contributes to a lot of existential angst – I read once that our capacity for happiness is relative to our acceptance of our own mortality.

So, I put a countdown on my phone.

*

The great tax dodging mystic Osho said, die each moment so that you can live each moment. For who has not already died one hundred million times? Where is that little girl or boy that you once were? Where is their body? It can’t be found, it cannot be visited, the cells that made up that four-year-old child died years ago and were replaced by the cells that make your body now.

We live our lives in denial of death and then don’t know how to manage it when it visits. That’s a kind of mass psychosis. And it stops us living with presence because we fixate on the past rather than letting it die.

I say we, I mean culturally. You may have your own views or feelings on death that are far more evolved than mine, but as a culture our relationship with death sucks. Many people will go through life never seeing a dead body, we have sanitised death for fear of causing upset, hidden away all the reminders, embalmed it in formaldehyde and anointed it with rouge.

*

There is a vitality I experience in India and Nepal I don’t experience in the West that I would attribute to our differing relationships with death. India was where I first met death face to face.

Children scattered across a highway.

A bloated corpse bobbing in the backwaters of Kerala.

In Kathmandu I took my daughter to the burning ghats, a place where the sacred meets the profane, the air heavy with thick, greasy black smoke that rises from the funeral pyres, curling into a hospice window above, where the dying look down at the platforms that await them. Touts, barbers, sadhus, lepers and tourists mingle beside garlands of carnations and wheely bins as the professional sweepers scrape the ash from the stone platforms into the filthy river below.

*

I was asked once, on a podcast, how I would like to be remembered. I won’t be, was my reply. That’s a bit negative isn’t it? Said the host.

I don’t think so. I think it makes me a realist. Of the one hundred and twenty billion humans who ever lived so far, how many can you name? One hundred? Two hundred?

Can you tell me your great-great grandmother’s name?

It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter that you and I will be forgotten. Because, to contradict everything I’ve said so far, you won’t really be dead. I remember when my girls were tiny I was driving them somewhere and a little voice came from the back of the car, daddy, where will you go when you die?

It was one of those moments when I answered before I knew what I was going to say.

Don’t worry. I’ll be in you.

And as I said it I realised I meant it.

My grandparents died years ago.

My relationship with them has only grown stronger.

They live in me, and through me.

A client once told me the story of his father’s murder.

When he finished, I asked:

How is your relationship with your dad now?

He stared at me, bewildered.

My father passed, he said.

I know, I said. How’s your relationship with him now?

He began to cry.

*

Some of you might be thinking – but I don’t have children? What of me? What will happen to my essence?

I saw a photograph once - the last surviving British veteran of the Great War.

Standing with over a hundred descendants.

One man. One woman. Many ripples.

You don’t have to have children to leave your mark. Unless you live in a cave, you’re going to interact with thousands of people in your lifetime.

As a therapist, I might touch hundreds of lives.

Each of them will touch hundreds more.

Thousands of ripples, moving outward, unseen.

I just won’t ever know.

We all have that capacity. Doesn’t matter if you don’t have children, if you’re not a therapist. It matters how you impact people.

I posted a package at my local post office recently.

Every time I come in here, I said to the ever-smiling woman behind the counter. You make me feel better. And I got all choked up. I live in a poor neighbourhood. She sits there, six days a week, serving people. With a smile. Making the world a better place.

We all have the capacity to leave ripples.

You don’t need to be a parent.

You just need to be present.

*

It’s only our ego that fears death, that part of us that cannot accept non-existence, that clings to the past and grasps at the future.

I remember the moment my soul entered the subdividing cells of the foetus that would be known as ‘me’.

And yes, I had a head full of entheogens when I had that particular flashback, but that doesn’t matter, the detail is not important…

It’s my memory. And I like it.

Because it was a recollection of what it meant to be in an egoless state. There were no thoughts, not opinions, no attitudes, no concepts. Just a state of being. What’s more, it didn’t feel new when I arrived. It felt like something I brought with me, that had existed before ‘I’ existed.

And it felt… peaceful. And familiar.

*

There’s a belief in Buddhism that before you incarnated, you sat down with all your friends and relatives, enemies, lovers, children, parents, companions and wrote your life story. In advance. So that your soul could meet various challenges and hurdles in order that it might evolve.

I live with that belief. This is just a play. A story. A game. There are no mistakes, just a possibility to grow.

With that in mind, I strongly recommend you tear the arse out of life. Rinse every last drop. Reincarnation is plausible but not guaranteed. Don’t get hung up on your spotless reputation. Leave this world, in your own tiny way, a better place than you found it.

Make a fucking mark.

*

“The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly coloured, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while.

Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride."

And we … kill those people.

"Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real."

It's just a ride.

But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride.

And we can change it any time we want.

It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money.

Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love.

The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off.

The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.

Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defences each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace”.

Bill Hicks