Deathbed soliloquies

Final confession. The question “How do you feel about graduating?” has, since it was first uttered before me, forever been analogous to the question “How do you feel about dying?”

More often than not, those who ask the question possess the purest intentions, but I wonder what kind of answer they long for. Graduation, as with death, is not a matter I have significant control over. What does it matter how I feel about it? Whether I like it or not, it will happen. I may seek methods to hasten or inhibit its pace search for alternatives and artificial supplications, but nevertheless it marches on and in due time arrives and concludes my journey, concludes me. Only a fool would equivocate death and graduation in the strict literal sense; the human heart, notwithstanding, is a most passionate fool for endings. To prove this point of mine, in this article I shall use death and graduation interchangeably. Indeed, knowing naught else, in all endings the heart sees death — whether we care to admit it out loud or not.

As a freshman, I was destined to die, but to ask me about it at the time appeared ridiculous. How is a freshman to know a thing about death? As a senior, I am destined to die, yet now their eyes and inquiries eagerly turn to me, analyzing my every reaction, as if I now would have something to say about the matter. How come the one lying on the deathbed is expected to know a thing about death? The truth is the senior has no more knowledge about death than the freshman. The senior has no hidden answer, no secret revelation. The question is ridiculous. Yet, we ask it anyway. What else is there to talk about with the dying than their death? Why, the one thing the senior does have more experience with than the freshman: life.

The senior has lived. The freshman has yet to live. As we ask about death, if our question is to make any sense, we must realize we are truly asking about life. There is nothing to be said about death, and everything to be said about life. So the real question goes: “On the basis of your life lived, what do you think about its coming to an end?” Well, perhaps, that is a question I can answer.

The most important conclusion I have seen again and again is that life does not have a premeditated goal for anyone. We are sold this idea because it is a singularly simple narrative: we have a preformed purpose to chase after that we succeed or fail to acquire. That every experience you had the fortune to endure — every delightful laugh and shuddering howl, every lonesome conversation and placid walk, every fear entangled in every dream, every ardent snowstorm encompassing every freezing dance — all built toward a particular objective would be a most tragic, pointless life. Such life would be reductive and insulting. An inevitable reality is that your moments spent in this university have never solely been about getting that diploma, that job, that status, that recognition or whatever extrinsic goal you are coerced to pursue, whatever story we are force-fed to make sense of our inherently directionless lives. It is certainly for the most privileged idealist to pretend these extrinsic goals do not matter whatsoever, but those on their deathbed have no use for them any longer. As you lie down for a concluding occasion, as I do now in this deathbed soliloquy, I can assure you you will not think about these. You will think of much more important things, instead: the things that let you create your own meaning for your life.

You will think about your friends and how much you will miss them, for from your perspective in their very own way they too shall die. You will be surprised by the newfound beauty in the banal, in the things you shall no longer have the chance to take to be mundane, with your previous criticisms dulcetly transforming into echoes of nostalgic praise. You will think about your worst moments and, independent of the possibility of justice in this world, you will know you exist because of the bad as much as the good. You will consider the forlorn willow tree and its music it hums as the sun kisses its leaves, seeing yourself in it. You will recall that freshman you once were and abruptly grasp they now lie dead.

You will have a million things to say and none of the words with which to express them.

You will expectedly await the grand climax of your story before your departure, the promised summit all your narratives have been building toward, and understand that no such thing exists. There are eventful flashes, yet they are subsumed into the rest of your life as promptly as they arrived. You will, if you are so lucky, comprehend that the emotional outbursts depicted in the closing acts of fiction have a significantly wiser manifestation in a life well-lived: across time, every single day, in your most common of actions. Your life was never to end with a bang or a whimper, but to continue until it does not, concluding with a quiet, well-earned farewell and goodnight kiss.

Ultimately, you will be grateful. You will never have the chance to show it, no matter how hard you try, but those you love will know. That is why they ask about your death, after all. Even if no answer exists, it creates the space for that that you could never articulate. In the unspoken, in the incommunicable, therein lie your emotions, your art and your ardent heart — the things that never really die.