When someone dies, there is an uncomfortable heaviness, a something-is-out-of-order inner contraction. Emotions notwithstanding, physically, there is something that feels twisted and out of place inside. It seems, perhaps for an instant, or even unconsciously, very odd to be alive.

What is that? Emotions perhaps relieve that inner incongruity, because to stick with just the physical sensation seems unbearable. To be alive and in this body suddenly seems absurd. It’s not that one wants to die, not that at all, but there is the returning awareness that the gift of life is given just as freely as it is taken away. A thing the body knows, but the mind forgets. The body revolts where the mind cannot make sense. And so we cry, or sit silently, and the knot in the stomach is loosened.

Perhaps the knot, when fully experienced, is the unraveling of all delusions of certainty. Because certainty about life and the inevitability of death cannot coexist. And when the certainty falls away, certainty of belief, of identity, of the meaning, if any, of our very existence here, when all that falls away, what is left is the unbearable lightness of being.

I am. Death puts this notion up to the bright gaze of truth. The body revolts and shudders. It is not in collusion with this assumption. When someone dies, there is a loud crack in the fundamental rigidity in this shell we call self, and all its protective beliefs and ideas. The veil of separation thins, and there is something so out of the ordinary that can be seen if one were only to look unflinchingly. To look is to commit to living and loving wholeheartedly now, without fear, without hesitation, as if there were no time, no tomorrow, nothing to lose, nothing to fear. Death behooves us to be bold,  to tell the truth.

I don’t know if any of this is true…