Thoughts on Death

Lately, meaning for about the last 6-8 months, I have been thinking about death. It is not a thinking beset by fear. Rather, it feels like a deepening, a knowing that dying, that my death will come in the future. Near or distant, I don't know. I do know that thinking about my death comes to me at times directly, but at times also indirectly. Today, for example, I was walking through a small forested area near our house. It was one of those pre-fall days, where despite the brightness of the sun, a certain coolness pointing towards the end of the summer could already be felt. But it wasn't the temperature that got me thinking and feeling about death again. It was the smell of the forest. As I was inhaling deeply, memories flew by me, almost too fast to catch. Memories of hikes taken in other forests. I saw myself holding my grandmother's hand, walking by a huge fallen tree. I saw myself riding my bike through a forest near my hometown in Germany. I remembered a two-week hike through the Teutoburger Wald in Germany. I remembered: I have always loved the forest. And with that feeling of overwhelming love, just nestled right between the "o" and the "v" came the longing, the desire to do it again. To walk in the woods. And with that longing came doubts: will I? Mostly, will it be long enough? Or will it just be a few minutes, like today? Will it always feel too short?

And while I am thinking about these things, my three boys are walking in front of me. They are talking about Runescape--a multiplayer internet game--and I want to shout to them "stop it, smell the forest, before it's too late." Of course, I don't. They wouldn't understand. Not in that way at least.

I have recently taken to routinely spending time with friends. Several times a week I sit down with a friend for an hour of tea or coffee and....just hanging out. Beautiful times, really. But why do they seem so short? I remember doing this with my friends in high-school. Just for the ten minutes we had between class-periods, we would go and lie down on the grassy soccer-field, let the sun warm our limbs and faces and . . . just hang. Usually, we wouldn't say anything. What bliss! And it seemed endless despite its finite nature. I didn't know how short it all would seem. How after a few decades of life I would yearn for just those moments and wonder, if I would experience them again.

This "again" is central to what I'm experiencing about death. In it lies the question whether certain feelings, if not certain experiences, can come to us again. This I often feel: one more time I'd like to experience what it was like to lie in the sun like that, what it was like to kiss Bettina, my first girl-friend in seventh grade. One more time I'd like to know the pleasure of successfully playing through a self-composed song with my band, once again I want to harmonize with my friend and co-band member Katrin. (The first song we sang together was Cat Steven's Father and Son. I remember it to this day, the goose-bumps running up and down my spine. I never experienced such pleasure before!) I've sung in many other situations since, but this first time, well, it has stayed with me in ways none of the others have. I wish that one more time I could enter my old high-school as a student. Simply to feel what it was like. I wish I could one more time see my paternal grandparents walk from their house next door to ours, across our lawn to our back-porch, knocking on the window to join us for breakfast.

So, yes, I feel greedy. I guess what I'm saying is that I wish I could experience my life once more. Not to change a single thing about it. Not even to be more aware of it--I have so many vivid memories--no, just to experience it to reassure myself, perhaps, that these moments, strung together as my life, aren't lost. And yet, I know they are. In some way at least, they are. As such, they exist only in my brain. When I die, they will go too. There is no satisfying answer to the death of my experiences. No book, no memoir, no amount of photos, letters, and other documents from my life can substitute for their experience.

This is what I'm thinking about these days.