The first time I saw my father cry was at his grandmother’s funeral. I was too busy trying not to cough uninterruptedly to notice it at first, but when I looked around and scanned all the faces around me, my gaze froze at the sight of my father’s tears running down his face. Out of all the sad emotions I was feeling, confusion was the one that stuck out the most. I never saw him as anything else other than the strong one in our family, the protective type who always got up on his feet again before wasting time doing anything else. Suddenly his negative feelings were exposed for everyone else to see, and I didn’t understand what the real source of his tears were. Of course I knew that we were attending a funeral and that crying and mourning was part of its ritual, but I don’t think I fully realised the weight and definity of death at the time. I didn’t understand that my great-grandmother was actually gone for good. Did my father cry about his grandmother’s fate and the fact that she was stuck in nothingness for eternity? Was he sad that he’d never see her again? Or was he thinking about all the memories he’d only be able to relive in his imagination from now on?
I’m aware of how morbid it seems to choose death as the topic of my post-birthday piece, but I’ve come to believe that talking about dying goes hand in hand with talking about living. You can’t address the dead without mentioning the living, and vice versa, and what better time to talk about living when you’re literally celebrating having lived for x amount of years? As someone who’s had a dreadful fear of death since a young age, involving sleepless nights thinking about my own tombstone, the idea of nothingness, and the painful certainty that death comes to us all, it’s not exactly comfortable to embrace a topic that still haunts me regularly. In an act to confront my own fear of death, I have tried to find comfort through religion, supernatural beliefs and the consolation that the problem I see death as is something to be dealt with in the distant future. However, I noticed how none of these approaches really made me come to terms with the certainty of death, but rather prevented me from fully confronting my fear of it.
Every birthday is an important reminder of my own mortality. You might think it’s ridiculous that someone who’s young and healthy already starts worrying about her death, when there’s likely to be so many decades ahead of her. But the age was never relevant in regards to how much anxiety I felt over my future non-existence, because any time left on this earth seems miniscule in proportion to an eternity of nothingness that starts with our death. My birthday makes me think back and relive a past full of memories that make me smile or cringe in embarrassment and regret. However, they also make me evaluate how I’ve lived my life so far, and if I’ve done a good job. Did I lose sight of my goals, values or routines that make me happy? Did I find new things that enrich my life and was I able to maintain them? But most of all, no matter what the answer to any of these questions are, what steps should I take from here? Because as much as reevaluating your life choices sounds like a healthy and productive thing to do, it always comes with the horrible dread that I might have wasted some valuable time I’ll never get back. There’s always ways in which I could’ve lived a better, more fulfilling couple of years, and thinking that I won’t ever get a chance to try again gives me goosebumps. Every birthday, the fear of being deprived of all of these things forever when I die crawls back to me again.
It's important to grow self-aware of one's mortality - not only because it helps us find our real and valuable priorities in life, but also because I believe that the more you confront such an inevitability, the easier it can get to accept that it's completely out of our control. As the Stoic Cicero put it "To philosophise is to prepare fo death" or in Michel de Montaigne's words "To live well is to die well". I’m not entirely sure if any conversations about death or the nature of dying would’ve helped me to overcome my fear as a kid, but there are a couple of things I wish I could’ve said to my younger self who was sitting in her chair at the ceremony, her feet dangling off the floor. Next to all the attempts to calm my fear of death, including the suggestion that I shouldn’t worry about it now because I’ve got so much time left and that I never know what actually happens after we die, what I really needed to hear was that death is OK. In fact, it’s as much a part of life as living itself, because with every beginning, something will mark the ending. But we never think about funerals being a celebration of someone’s life that’s now come to an end. We never remind ourselves of our limitations in life up until we’re lying in our deathbed. It’s like we’re trying to suppress the thought that some of our experiences will be our last, or that there will come a time when we’re never going to be able to experience them ever again. But perhaps it’s death that makes life so special in the first place, as some things are only enjoyable because they are limited? There’s no chocolate that tastes good enough to eat unlimited amounts of in one sitting, no life that is enjoyable enough to be lived forever. Maybe I would’ve realised that my dad wasn’t necessarily crying out of sadness, or because he felt sad for my great-grandmother having lost consciousness forever, but that he was crying out of gratefulness and joy over all the good memories he had with her. Maybe he was simply crying because he loved her. Maybe someone should’ve told me that I’m loved enough for someone to cry like this when I die, too, and that there never has been, and never will be, anything wrong with this at all.
