By Dawn's Early Light

It came at me hard a week or so ago. The idea, the undeniable fact, that I will die. And that it will be sooner rather than later. When? I don’t know, of course, but, as I tell my wife, if I died tomorrow, no one would say, “He died so young!!” No, I’m way past that. I’m 80, closing in on 81. I’m at the age.

It came to me hard in the early morning. I was in bed, about to get up. Like a flash of lightening, I saw that I am facing oblivion, of losing every single potential experience, of not existing, with painful clarity. It entered my bones and body and sent a cold chill through me.

Memento mori. The Romans said it. “Remember that you will die.”

Then I thought of the late British poet, Philip Larkin, and of his poem, “Aubade.”

Larkin looks at his death directly in the eye. He speaks the truth starkly and with searing clarity. The first time I read the poem, I trembled. I know I need and want someone to materialize my fear and anguish about death—to feel as I do. Someone who speaks the truth with unflinching specificity.

This is an excerpt from Larkin’s “Aubade”:

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Larkin exposes one of my greatest fears:

“The good not done, the love not given, time / Torn off unused.”

If death haunts you—it will, surely, at some moment—read the entire poem. Or read it just because it’s a great poem. I find solace in Larkin’s disdain of denial.

The poem’s title, “Aubade,” refers to dawn and, usually, in poetry, to a lover’s parting. But dawn is also the time when things are lake-clear, when you haven’t had a chance to put on your protective armor. Layers that deflect dark thoughts and inevitabilities. Dawn is the moment when nothing protects you. You see.

Some people have religion to console them, to give them the idea and the hope that, if they are good, eternal life awaits them after they die. (Or eternal suffering if they haven’t behaved well on this earth.) But no one, not a single person, can provide you with proof. The fact that cannot be denied is that death will come to us all. And that our time on this earth will come to a close. We can ignore this, we can pretend it’s not going to happen, and we can shelve it in a remote part of our mind, but it cannot be changed, it cannot be made to be untrue. “The mind blanks at the glare,” Larkin writes.

I walk around. I know that one day, I won’t. I won’t be here. No more seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, touching. It will all be gone. Gone. A simple stone-cold fact. Impossible to believe. I will die.

True.

I take a deep breath. My lungs fill with precious air. I hear the sounds of birds singing. I watch the new sun rise. I taste morning air. I touch the wood handle of my shovel. My wife tells me it will rain later today. I love its smell.

Alive.

Inevitability makes me live more fiercely.