Death may not be the edge of memory where life is forgotten, but the release of dependency on memory to substantiate the experience of the present.
Life happens in the past, where we define and describe what happened in a past present.
Maybe death is a vehicle that allows us to catch up with ourselves as we shed all dependency.
Maybe.
I don't know.
To learn a friend dies is not to lose them [to anything unnatural].
Perhaps death is when the existence of the friend is supremely valued, expressed in the extra-ordinary amount of time they remain in our attention after we learn they are, indeed, in the salad.
Death is the edge of memory. No difference exists between death and forgetting. Many things have already died times-over merely through not-remembering.
What is valuable in experiencing the loss of anything is understanding it was never actually a possession. In the end, no one possesses a single aspect of whatever life could be; an island of picking-up and putting-down; animals fighting, fawning and fretting over everything-on-loan, including each other.
Is there an ecstatic equivalent to grief, a celebratory anti-agony towards those still alive, on par with the intensity of loss?
If so, do we wait to express this anti-agony for no real reason or do we have a reason to wait?
Those still alive surround us as much as our memories of those dead. Are we waiting for something sensible or is loss the only time we can actually fully engage, finally free to feel what we really feel about what we can no longer feel?
Do we love our loved ones with as much verve as their eventual loss will create in our life or is that what love is, a penultimate comprehension of inevitable loss?
Is loving a game forever rigged in the favour of absence, all of us balanced on the edge of grieving, clowns carrying stacks of glassware under a dying sun?
After all, what is it we feel grief for when we learn we lost something? Isn't it for the very thing loss demands we celebrate, the reality of something we like? We like something! Wow! How brave of us!
Have you ever cried for the loss of a lover who is still alive, wandering the island, making love to someone else? Isn't it oddly beautiful, that pain? This kind of beauty is what we live for and what haunts us...the way we affect each other haphazardly and thunderously.
The beauty of friends is they may be the only immortal reality possible, their lives intertwined with ours, long after they are out of view.
Would you trade in all the grief for no friends, no lovers? Me neither.
Fearing suffering to the point of not loving is a drawn-out form of suicide. Simpler to swallow a bullet than to cage up the heart. Fearing suffering is for those who won't risk their delusions on the stark honesty of reality. All is already lost. "Eat, drink and be merry!"
ps/smoh
May memories of your friends, alive and dead, bring you fat smiles and endless reasons to carry on wildly.
