Geiger Counter

The gift of death   “I’ve been hearing good things about Taco Bell lately,” my daughter said casually after I asked her what we should get for lunch.  We were driving down a county road. The rusty bed of the truck was filled with chicken feed, fishing poles, a bright red paddle board and the detrital nick-knacks of long summer days: A lone sandal. A perpetually wet towel. Organic toys and trophies found on the forest floor and the river’s bed: stones, seeds and sticks.  “You have?” I asked, suddenly wondering if my daughter had been taking culinary advice from inebriated college freshmen without my knowledge.  “Yeah.” “Who is saying these good things?” “Ads.” “Taco Bell ads?” “Yeah!” “Oh,” I said. “So, ads pretty much always say good things about the things they are trying to sell you. Just be aware of that.”  “Does that mean Taco Bell isn’t good?” she asked.  “In the right circumstances it can be incredible, but you are far too young for those circumstances, and I’m far too old, plus I have to drive,” I said. “It’s not something to eat every day.”  “Oh,” she said, pondering for a moment. “So, is it not healthy?”  The question fell squarely into the “Is the sun not cold?” or “Are politicians not honest?” line of querying.  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” “Huh.” She seemed pleased to have learned yet another thing. Her eyes glinted as if in awe of all the mysteries that lay before her.  These are the types of conversations I have. Sincere exchanges with someone who is still young enough to look intensely at the world. She sees more than the adults around her – all children do – but she does not yet know in which vessels, if she opens them up, she will find meaning. She sees more and understands less, and every day the latter grows, by its very nature diminishing the former. By the time she is fully grown, if she is not careful, she will run the risk of understanding much of the world, but that understanding will have replaced the sweet, intense vision of young people who see things so very well, on the first leg of their journey through life.  As knowledge replaces vision, she will have to grapple with meaning, as we all do.  In the sixth of his exquisite “My Struggle” books, Karl Ove Knausgaard talks about his father’s death. He observes that when we accept that life is meaningless, we are granted immense freedom. But of course, the meaningless of the world deprives our freedom of any meaning. His solution is simple yet brilliant: Meaning is created in the eye, not within the things the eye sees. While there are many gods, those that give life and those that give death, those that give rain and sun and abundant harvests and plagues, we are the givers of meaning. For that reason alone we are special.  “Nothing means anything on its own,” he points out. “Only when an object is seen does it become.”  “All significance arises in the eye, all meaning in the heart,” he continues. We humans are the only creatures with the power to create this meaning and affix it to things. It is an immense power.  “[W]e are the givers of meaning, and this is not only our responsibility but our obligation,” he writes.  It is a strange and powerful idea; that we can do so much by seeing the world around us. If you go to the doctor with a broken leg, you don’t want her to just sit there and stare at it. You want her to give you painkillers and a cast. But seeing the wound is important, in and of itself. Even seeing things you cannot fix or change is important.  In the religious worldview of the first people to live in what is now Wisconsin, there was a god named “Disease Giver.” This deity doled out life from one half of its body, and sickness and death from the other side. I like the fact that it is called “Giver” and that both life and death are seen as gifts. It would be tempting to call this god “Life Taker,” which is how many people see the Grim Reaper, as someone who visits the mortal realm to harvest human souls, leaving behind a tragic hole. But that is not the only way to see it, for every religion needs (and has) someone who must do this job.  It reminds me of a book by the philosopher Derrida, called “The Gift of Death.” I was supposed to read it in college. I didn’t understand it, nor did I finish it, but the title always stuck with me, and the general idea that something we often think of as the universe’s cruelest joke is actually a present laid down before our feet, a great equalizer and a universal package for rich and poor alike.  Some people think death robs all life of its meaning. Others think it is the thing that imbues existence with meaning, that things matter because they will soon be swallowed by the insatiable maw of oblivion. Both of these groups assume that death is powerful and profoundly important. Yet there is a third option, which is that it is merely one of many gifts – the final gift – laid down at the feet of the living. We all know that you cannot ever change the past. In fact, I believe it is one of the few things that even mighty deities cannot change in the various mythologies they inhabit. What is written is written forever, until time itself dissipates and vanishes. In the face of death you could easily say: “You, even you, cannot change the past. What has happened, has happened, even after you take us away from here.”  “You,” you could say to death, “cannot change anything that happened before you arrived.”  A week ago, I woke up early one morning and read a text message from a friend, a kind, generous and wise person. A person powerful and kind. Their daughter had died, they told me.  A few days ago, I attended the remembrance ceremony. It was outdoors, in a garden filled with sobbing people. As they cried, the sky above opened up and began weeping as well, soaking us with water that ran off of our “fancy” clothes and into the earth, where it fed flowers and fruits alike. Eventually, both the heavens and the humans ran out of tears.  What does one write in response to this? There is no undoing it. But death is not fully death, because meaning is not in the things we see. Meaning is in our eyes. And as long as we fasten our gaze, and as long as we give the gift of meaning to the things we see, death is perhaps not quite as all-encompassing as we suspected. Because as long as we look at those we love, be it at their curly hair, wild and kissed by the summer sun as they sit beside us in an old truck, or simply at their memory after they are gone, meaning remains. The love people have for their children, for their parents, for all the things to which they affix meaning, is not diminished when one of them dies. It is actually amplified. Death is horrible and sad, of course, but perhaps the love and meaning that it magnifies and illuminates are part of the strange gift that is brought to us all, in the end.