Αἰωνία ἡ μνήμη (Eternal Memory) Chapter 9

Meditations

I’m sitting here, watching the snow melt as the winter season succumbs to the freshness of spring. I’m listening to songs on the radio, looking through my CD stack and a pile of poetry books that I need to find a shelf for. I notice a connection, or perhaps merely my own superstitions, in what surrounds me. For years I’ve recognized the sorrow I feel when I listen to my City of Angels soundtrack. The lyrics speak my story. Books that I’ve collected over the years contain quotes and verse that touch my soul.


Sweet sweet Impermanence,
The world is lightened by your presence.
- Azam Ali

I have found that life can threaten many things, but promises only one – death. The only promise life keeps is that at some point, some where, some time, some way, death will come. A life is born, but there are no guarantees that they will marry, have children, a job, have friends, or know their family. These are chances, not promises. A life is born, but may have to overcome abandonment, loss or lack of love, solitude, misery, pain – no promises of happiness and harmony exist. The only assurance is that at last death will come.

We can be sure of nothing. Yet there is one fact that is certain, namely, that a time will come, a morning or a night, when you will be called to make the journey out of this world, when you will have to die.
- John O’Donohue

Death is partial to no one. It does not distinguish between religion or culture, location or age. Death finds no prejudice or discrimination. As one is born, they will find death.

The destination of human time is death.
- John O’Donohue

People attempt to cheat death in their search for the fountain of youth and the immortality granted by the golden apple. These quests to escape death had failed.

We witness the death of strangers, friends, family, animals, life. The pain felt is universal; it tears at the heart; tears flood the void; emptiness prevails. No matter that a spouse lends a hand for strength, the last breath frees itself from the body, the heart drum fades, darkness comes; pain ripples through the senses. No matter that a child peers pleadingly at their groomed parent’s coffin; agony and confusion suffocate.

I buried my father on his 59th birthday, and it made no matter that he suffered his last years; I felt the pain of ages gone by. I cried with all those that had cried before me and with all those that would in times to come.

The life and passions of a person leave an imprint on the ether of a place.
- John O’Donohue

If this is true that death leaves behind something for the living. If this is true then we must go beyond the five known senses and reawaken our unknown senses to find comfort from those who have gone before us. Are these the hauntings and ghostly presences that people claim to witness? These imprints must be strong to recapture the physical-ness of life past. I seek each day for my father’s imprint, but I do not sense it or maybe I have not reopened my inner self to feel him.

Because my father and I shared little more than blood prior to the last year of his life, I do not know where to look for him—where his mark may be. I look to the sky for an image in the clouds; I listen to the wind for his voice; I breathe in his cologne for a sense of his smell; I sit in his chair hoping to feel his essence, but he is gone; only his memory haunts me.

Memory is where our vanished days secretly gather.
- John O’Donohue

Will his memory be my only comfort? The thought pains me. Where is the key to open my soul to find him once more to not feel so alone?

The death of a loved one is bitterly lonely.
- John O’Donohue

The mind is full of what could be, but no one knows for sure. I fear the possibility of nothingness.

All of human life stands under the shadow of nothingness, the umbra nihili.
- Master Eckhart

But I revel in the thought of a beautiful and peaceful afterlife with the possibility of reincarnation. My hopes lie in the idea of destiny, a purpose for living.

To be born is to be chosen. No one is here by accident. Each one of us was sent here
for a special destiny.
- John O’Donohue

I find comfort in believing that my father’s purpose was met; his destiny achieved, and that his time on earth had passed accordingly. This I hope so that there may be a place where I can hug him tightly once again.

In all the answers that we seek only one is true – death WILL come. And when death takes one of us a connection is forged between the spirits of the mourning people: a shared pain throughout the ages.

There is the darkness of the unknown at our origin. We suddenly emerged from this unknown, and the band of brightness called life began. Then there is the darkness at the end when we disappear again back into the unknown.
- John O’Donohue

We don’t know or understand, but we feel what is in our soul.

There are things that are known, and things that are unknown: in between are the doors.
- William Blake

Death is the door between life that we know and beyond - the unknown.