What does death sound like?
Does it come with a warning or does it just happen all of a sudden?
A lot of us are told that when you're dying,
You know it beforehand,
Especially when you are in a higher space.
But I love to read a lot about death and write about it.
It's a fascinating place to be,
Especially when death is seen from a poet's point of view.
What does death sound like to you if it had a sound chord in F-sharp minor?
Surely it will be a minor chord,
Can't be major.
So today in F-sharp minor,
I shall be talking about death from my point of view and from the point of view of a lot of poets and writers and philosophers.
Whatever we can manage in 10 minutes.
The price of living wholeheartedly is the heartbreak of many losses.
The loss of love to dissolution,
Distance or death.
The loss of the body to gravity and time.
And because loss leaves in its wake an experience so private,
Yet so universal,
The common record of human experience that we call literature is filled with reflections on death.
A 2000-year-old letter about the key to resilience in the face of loss or spare and melancholy consolation,
To memoir of mornings and soulful meditation on the paradox of bereavement.
No writer in my reading life has charted the fractal reaches of grief with more nuance and precision than Emily Dickinson,
The poet,
The laureate of love and loss,
Of the interplay between the two,
The interplay between the beauty and the terror of being alive as we drift daily towards the infinite.
Dickinson puts it,
I measure grief I meet with narrow probing eyes.
I wonder if it weighs like mine or has an easier size.
I wonder if they bore it long or did it just begin.
I could not tell the date of mine,
It feels so old,
A pain.
I wonder if it hurts to live and if they have to try and whether,
And whether could they choose between,
It would not be to die.
I note that some gone patient long at length renew their smile,
An imitation of a light that has so little oil.
I wonder if when ears have piled some thousands on the harm that hurt them early,
Just a lapse could give them an e-bomb or would they go on aching still through centuries of nerve and light into a larger pain in contrast with the love,
The grieved.
The grieved are many,
I am told.
There is the various cause,
Death is but one and comes but once and only nails the eyes.
There is grief of want and grief of cold.
A sort they call despair,
There is banishment from native eyes in the sight of native air and though I may not guess the kind correctly,
Yet to me a piercing comfort it affords in passing Calvary.
To note the fashions of the cross and how they are mostly worn,
Still fascinated to presume that some are like my own.
She carries on in a 793rd poem.
Grief is a mouse and chooses Wayne Scott in the breast for his shy house and baffles quest grief is a thief quick startle pricks his ear report to hair of that vast dark that swept his being back grief is a juggler boldest at the play lest if he flinched the eye that way pounce on his bruises one say or three grief is a garment spared his luxury best grief is tongueless before he will tell burn him in the public square his ashes will possibly if they refuse how then no since a rack couldn't coax a syllable now grief I've had personal losses nothing like losing my own dad this year only when you lose somebody so close so personal what it meant to lose somebody so close and conspicuous by his absence is a term that was coined by somebody who has lost somebody so close it felt like a world without the sky a land without footsteps breathing without air this is the time for all of us to close our eyes and remember one person we miss dearly and what's left of them their memories the looking back on grief is never easy and Dickinson has helped us re-endure a day we thought the mighty funeral of all conceived joy to recollect how busy grass did meddle one by one till all the grief with summer waved and none could see the stone and though the woe you had today be larger as the sea exceeds this unremembered drop their water equally let's conclude today's session by breathing deeply inhale through your nose and exhale with a sigh try to run it through your entire body how grief reaches places we didn't even know existed in us sigh out everything that is beyond us sigh out all the loss and death and fear sigh out with a surrender to the universe that we don't understand so huge and so complex that we are such a tiny speck in it we are not here to conquer the universe we are here to just exist and leave gracefully as and when tonight close your eyes and sleep sleep without any fear of losing or leaving it's beyond you and I we are bound to exist and not exist all of a sudden just breathe in and observe the changes that's happening every second in us observe these changes starting with a breath to sensations to our feelings and emotions and see them pass by wave us goodbye see you in our next podcast with another beautiful writer who loves to celebrate grief and death
