Death

Death is

The opposite

Of time.

We give death metaphors. We cloak it in meaning and make up stories about what  will happen to us, but we don’t really know. When a person dies, we cannot see beyond the corpse. We speculate on reincarnation or talk in terms of eternity. But  death is opaque to us, a mystery. In its realm, time ceases to have meaning.

All  laws of physics become irrelevant. Death is the opposite of time.

What dies?

Is anything actually destroyed?

Certainly not the body, which falls  into its constituent parts of water and chemicals. That is mere transformation, not  destruction.

What of the mind?

Does it cease to function, or does it make a transition to another existence?

We don’t know for sure, and few can come up with anything conclusive.

What dies?

Nothing of the person dies in the sense that the constituent parts  are totally blasted from all existence. What dies is merely the identity, the identification of a collection of parts that we called a person.

Each one of us is a role, like  some shaman wearing layers of robes with innumerable fetishes of meaning. Only  the clothes and decoration fall. What dies is only our human meaning. There is still  someone naked underneath.

Once we understand who that someone is, death no  longer bothers us. Nor does time.