Passages... and the Impermanence of Things (Ulog No. 27)

Tomorrow at 10:00am, our friend Nancy will leave this plane of existence.

Nancy is in her 60's and has end-stage Multiple Sclerosis. She has reached a point where she has lost mobility, finds it hard to swallow and breathing is difficult. She is in almost constant pain.

Cherry blossoms

She freely made the decision to take advantage of Washington State's "Death With Dignity" law and has chosen to end her own suffering before descending into a terminal spiral of increasing pain and helplessness.

This past week, she's been seeing friends, to say goodbye.

Whereas I feel sadness — and she will be missed — I am also in total support of her choice.

The Inevitable Impermanence of Things

Here in the US, we have a funny relationship with life. Well.. actually, we have a funny relationship with death. I remember one of the earliest cultural jokes I heard when I first arrived in the US after growing up in Europe:

Q: "What's the easiest way to tell the difference between an American and European?"

A: The American believes death is optional.

Even now, I still get a chuckle out of that... but I also sense the undercurrent of truth there.

But I am digressing, a bit...

Japanese maples

The slight sadness I feel at Nancy's passage reminds me of one of my all-time favorite philosophical tenets: The Japanese life perspective of "Mono no Aware."

It's almost impossible to translate and has — as I recall — its roots in Shintoism, which is an entirely Japanese thing. It can be described as something along the lines of "the slight ennui one feels at the recognition that life and all things are transient."

It's a bittersweet sensation... the stunning beauty of clouds of pink cherry blossoms in spring, and yet they will be gone in a matter of a week or two; the stunning sunset... but it will be gone in minutes; on a larger scale, we watch the innocence of childhood give way to adulthood and the feeling arises when we look at our now-adult child's teddy bear, still on a shelf in our guest room.

It's not exactly melancholia, because the sensation tends to be swift; fleeting... and yet it is also pervasive, because all things are essentially transient.

Including life, itself.

Thanks for reading!

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Created at 190425 23:56 PST
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