Death in the Face of Death

Watching the country’s long-expected rapid descent into fascism is numbing. The images out of L.A. aren’t just reminiscent of 2020; they evoke a foreboding of something somehow worse. The scenes of tanks on train tracks into DC for a military parade are the hallmark of a dictatorship in the making, yet too many people remain in denial – and have lived in blissful ignorance for years.

Mounting any kind of fight against it is both terrifying and life-giving. Knowing there’s a fight worth a damn adds meaning and hope in spite of this particularly sinister moment.  But it also forces me to confront tough questions about my own limits and boundaries. Or lack thereof. It seems some of us can stomach more than others, but if this moment didn’t demand we ask what we’re living for – or willing to die for – I’m not sure I could claim to have lived the ‘examined life’ if not seriously tackling those questions. 

What am I willing to die for? No – what would I be proud to die for? My country? No, it’s not really patriotism that’s my guiding light. That sits adjacent to a kind of nationalism that makes me particularly uncomfortable. My rights, then? I don’t want to give those up, but I have to admit I’ve already been willing to and we all have for years.

Maybe the answer is just each other. It’s not some grandiose ideology, though there are certainly ideologies at play. It’s simpler: we have an obligation to one another – even, if not especially, the strangers among us. 

To watch the most vulnerable among us kidnapped and disappeared without a thought isn’t just an outrage or an abomination. It’s something we should be willing to die to stop. But that’s much easier typed than lived.

I must confess that lately I have felt very much as though I’m fading into oblivion. There are reasons for this beyond the state of the country or the planet. It’s like a scene in ‘Back to the Future’ where Marty McFly looks at a picture of himself and sees he’s fading over time and there’s a real possibility he could cease to exist if he fails in his mission.

I’m trying hard to rewrite this narrative though. Because I’m painfully aware that what the next few months and years will bring will be a rollercoaster of these kinds of feelings. So, what if rather than trying to avoid it, I aim to embrace it instead? 

Fading into oblivion implies I still exist and have something left to give of myself, after all. What if, instead, I am merely coming to terms with the fact that I’m already dead, which is technically true from a certain point of view within the confines of time and space. 

Maybe being dead can play to an advantage. Dead people, after all, have nothing to lose. In feeling nothing, they can’t be hurt. They draw crowds and help people remember. They have the advantage of timelessness. To be truly dead is to know best what those who are living should cherish most. So, too, death brings liberation from the shackles of life. There’s no fear in place of what already is or will be. The dead, then, carry a power the living cannot, and so living into our death and dying fully to self overcomes the trappings of life in a way nothing else can.  

I’m thinking of the courage of Ukrainians or Syrians or Palestinians when I write this – those for whom death has knocked at their door and, though the word “resilience” gets thrown their way too often, I sometimes see it as less a kind of resilience and more simply an embrace of death in the face of those who threaten it. You can’t threaten me with what I’ve already embraced. The life I live in spite of those threats is lived much differently if I’ve already confronted that fear and come to terms with it.

That is to say, in sum, I think there’s an immortality to the spirit of a people who have confronted death in this way. It’s a source we may need to draw from in the coming months and years – one in which the human spirit becomes an idea, not merely a bodily entity timed to an end.

In other words, what are we willing to die for? Nothing. In death, we intend to live forever. And for princes and principalities, may there be nothing more terrifying than a people with nothing left to lose.