The Fear of Impermanence, The Certainty of Change

Why is it called life insurance anyway? It doesn’t insure that you will live. In fact, the industry is pretty much based on the fact that everyone is going to die. So why don’t they call it death insurance? Accuracy and honesty in one phrase.

We know, somewhere deep inside us beneath the armor of our denial, that we, and everyone we know, is going to die someday. Yet when it happens, even at the end of a long terminal disease process, we are always caught by surprise. There is a moment of disbelief that we were not the ones to escape mortality. Was it something we never expected?

People expect babies and are not surprised when an infant comes mewling into this reality. But where was that being before conception? Was it lying on the deathbed of another plane, surrounded by those of its kind who never thought it would leave them? Why do we not expect death?

Can you imagine the difference it would make if we celebrated the passage from this life as we do the passage into it? I can see it now. Instead of baby showers where we bestow gifts on the incoming, there would be dearly departed showers celebrating the shedding of the mortal coil, the transition back into that incredible lightness of being. A person who knew their time was coming could spread their worldly goods among whomever they desired, share the joy of giving and receiving. Those who leave unexpectedly (see? there’s that conundrum again) would have their leftovers distributed by family or friends, maybe at some kind of potlatch ceremony.

In either case, there would be food and drink and wrapping paper. People would share remembrances and experiences – just like a baby shower. Only instead of the usual “my labor was longer/shorter/worse/more dignified than yours," people would sit around eating petit fours with little blue or pink icing caskets on top and expound on how so-and-so’s death was longer/shorter/worse/more dignified than another so-and-so’s.

Of course, I am speaking from an essentially Western point of philosophical reference. There are in fact other cultures which already do this. For them, birth and death are just two sides of a door we pass through in a lifetime – leaving one place and going to another. Birth. Death. No difference. Just a change of semantics or body size, and not always even that. Babies die, too.

So here we sit on our side of the planetary rock, wobbling through a mostly uncharted vacuum, living in fear that someone or something is about to be taken away from us. And when, not if, that happens, we are sure we will be the lesser for having lost them/it. So our fear of impermanence, which is actually our intuitive knowledge that nothing is permanent, expands into the accompanying fears of loneliness, lack, death, and even the dark.

When my kids were afraid of the unknowns that lurked in the darkness, I would turn on the light and show them that there was nothing in the dark that was not there in the light. The lurking bear in the dark corner once more became, in the light, the pile of laundry on the toy box, the hovering ghost once more the curtain fluttering in the breeze of an open window. Maybe we need someone to turn on the light, show us that what we fear on one side of the earth’s rotation is something we wouldn’t give a second glance in the light of the other side.

The Buddhists believe that everything is change, nothing is permanent, and that it is our clinging to thoughts or possessions or people out of our fear of losing them that causes our suffering. Maybe so. I’ve got to admit that life always run a little smoother when I let go of what I am so afraid of losing. How can the universe fill my hand if I refuse to empty it so I can receive?

It flooded in New Hampshire this week, more of nature’s display of her power over human arrogance. My sister/friend of many lifetimes had to flee the water and returned to find her home still standing, but some possessions ruined. She is cleaning out after the storm, tossing the old to the curb, and bringing in the new. I am glad she is unhurt, happier still that she did not have to face the pain of losing family. See how hard it is to let go of the idea that transition is synonymous with pain and loss?

Several years ago, I thought I could not live without her within eyesight. Now I find that I can wait out the days until I learn she is safe without falling into the black hole of panic that she might be gone forever. As the days of my life move past, I am finding it easier and easier to open my hands to the surrender that allows the re-cycling of life, the second chances, the new and unexpected wonder that envelopes me when I stop struggling to find it.

But until the moment of surrender itself, I cling hard and fast to what has already moved on without me. And I suffer.