To begin to understand duality is to acknowledge that things exist only because of the realness of their opposites: light/dark, up/down, money in your pocket/empty pocket, yin/yang, and the most difficult to comprehend——life/death.
Before arrival on the Slippery Slope, there was MY life and the living of it. The days passed, the years passed, and only life existed. Gradually, through my study of Buddhism, my focus changed. Buddhists sometimes meditate in the charnel grounds, where bodies are chopped up and offered to the sky birds for their sustenance. The main tenet of Buddhism, impermanence, hit home with its irrefutable truth. From my unaware immersion in everyday life, another reality became clear. I will die. My body will decay and be absorbed by the earth.
Humans have known that life ends in death for a long, long time. However, a conscious realization, which reveals the truth of death as the yang of life, involves study and thought and imagining. There becomes a tipping point on life’s journey, when the presence of death cannot be denied nor mitigated. I rehearse what I think it would be like to be dead. Friends are getting older. They get cancer. Family shrinks—-grandparents die, aunts and uncles get sick. Will I lose my wife before I lose me? I notice my body is wearing out, little by little. From being a world traveler, I am now sort of content to stay in one place—to observe quietly and cogitate.
And…what is the gift of knowing that death lurks for me? That living is not as exciting and full of potential as it used to be? Because the reality of death IS a gift. The poignancy and ephemeral beauty of each moment shines with a brilliant light. I do not wish young people to learn of the life/death reality. It would be too overwhelming to live this way—-one eye on life and a huge eye on death. But it not only suits where we are as we sight the Slippery Slope, it is a requirement to go out in glory, grabbing for the marrow of each second, in full awareness of the darkness on the horizon.
I'm 85 and I think of death often. I'm lucky in that almost all my body parts are still mostly working
well , and I'm proud of being a 25-year veteran of diabetes type 1 with no complications. I wish for a death in my sleep but of course, as the song goes, you can't always get what you want. To keep death an arm's length away from me, I walk for an hour a day and eat a healthy diet, mostly. I live in a leafy lovely neighborhood in the pacific northwest and my youngest daughter, now 55, lives with me. Although the world is bleak now, I still feel that life is good. I can only hope for a timely end.