How many times have you died?

A couple days ago I found myself thinking about death, and an interesting thought came to me.

Of course, meditation is supposed to help you let go of craving so that you don't fear death. And classical philosophy likewise was supposed to help you keep calm in the face of death. In the Phaedo, Socrates says that philosophy is the daily practice of death.

But really, how can any of us be calm when we are about to die?

Well, what I realized is that when it is my turn to die my body probably won't be calm because instinctively my body is designed to want to live at all costs. If I fall, my body will be afraid. If I drown, my body will be afraid. In either case that physical panic is sure to disrupt my mental equilibrium.

But if I am just getting weaker, if I simply know that one day I will go to sleep and not wake up ... I no longer expect that to frighten me because I realize that I've been through it before. At least twice.

When Wife and I left graduate school I found it disorienting. Sure, there were things I had to do: get a job, move into our apartment, make dinner, ... that sort of thing. But I realized that all my life I had understood my entire existence in terms of school. I had spent all my time being tested and having to please other people. And now, at a stroke ... that was over. (Or so I thought.) Now that I was no longer in school, I [thought that I] no longer had to care whether I measured up to other people's standards. I no longer had to worry about constantly improving myself. If I decided that This Is Good Enough, I could just sit down and stop growing right here. It was up to me.

Of course that was never really true. I still had to be measured by my boss's standards if I wanted to keep my job. But thinking it gave me a feeling of autonomy and agency that I had never had before. So in a sense it didn't matter if it were literally true. Measured in terms of its practical consequences for my outlook on life, it was true enough. And it meant there was a whole stable-full of fears that I didn't have to worry about any more. I could just let them go. They no longer applied to my life.

The same thing happened during the period when I was separating from Wife. A lot of concerns that dictated how I related to other people gradually fell away. I had built up a stable-full of fears about how to handle the intimate relationships in my life. These fears had governed how I interacted with Wife, and with D, and even to some extent with Debbie. But I realized I could just let them go. They no longer applied to my life. And the internal ground rules governing my relationship with Marie are very different.

And this is what I think -- intellectually -- an awareness of the nearness of death will mean for me. I think it will mean that all the things I used to worry about will fall away ... that I will realize I can just let them go ... that they will no longer apply to my life. No point worrying about This or That when I'm dead. And if I'm close enough to dead, maybe I can stop worrying about them today anyway. If I have so far failed to achieve this or that dream ... well by that time I'll know they ain't gonna happen. And I will have to be OK with that, because I'll have no choice.

Thirty-two years ago, I died as a Scholar. Five years ago, I died as a Husband. When it comes time for me to die as a Man ... well, nobody knows the future but I somehow think it will be easier than it would have been otherwise because I've had practice.

How many times have you died?