The meaning of life

As even a casual visitor to this blog soon finds out, I have blogged in plenty about death. And regular readers know this all too well, though it is not this particular topic that drove away many of the old regulars (instead, it was this topic!)

I came across an essay on death and how we humans have changed the ways in which we relate to "the body."  It is by Thomas Lynch--a name I chanced upon years (decades?) ago when listening to NPR.  Lynch is truly one of a kind.  He is a poet and essayist, yes, but he is also an undertaker.  Yep, an undertaker, who took over his father's business after his father died.  How many such people have you ever heard about?  Ok, this woman comes close to that kind of a uniqueness.

Lynch's essay is a must-read for anybody at any age.  After all, we know well that we, too, will die, sooner or later.  And our loved ones too will die.  Lynch's essay is a narrative that will make people think about death.  He writes there, imagining life when humans were cave-dwellers, say, about 70,000 years ago, and the suddenly still and cold body then framed "what are the signature questions of our species":

Is that all there is? Why is he cold? Can this happen to me? What comes next? Of course, there are other questions, but all of them are uniquely human, because surely no other species ponders such things. This is when the first glimpse of a life before or beyond this one begins to flicker into our species’ consciousness, and questions about where we come from and where we go take up more and more of the moments not spent on rudimentary survival.

These are the kinds of questions that compel me to think a lot about death.  As I wrote--coincidentally, this post was just about a year ago on the 26th of September:

What happens to us after we die?  Where did grandma end up?  What about childhood friends? Heck, where did our favorite pet go upon death?These are troubling questions.  And emotionally taxing questions.

Lynch's essay is about something more immediate.  How do we relate to the body?  Lynch writes that we have increasingly become disconnected from the body itself.

The bodiless obsequy, which has become a staple of available options for bereaved families in the past half century, has created an estrangement between the living and the dead that is unique in human history. Furthermore, this estrangement, this disconnect, this refusal to deal with our dead (their corpses), could be reasonably expected to handicap our ability to deal with death (the concept, the idea of it). And a failure to deal authentically with death might have something to do with an inability to deal authentically with life.

And that is the critical point that I have forever presented even here in this blog: Not sincerely dealing with death and the dead body, makes us less capable of sincerely dealing with life itself.