On Death

As the news of Ali's passing sits on my mind today, I think about the meaning of death to me. It feels so abstract, as if it were some philosophical concept to be thought about, deconstructed and articulated in some 'profound' analogy. Death, when it comes, is just the end of life (life in the secular sense: bodily life, terrestrial life), the end of the functioning of our bodies and, most likely, our minds.

But it is always abstract to me. I have never seen death of any kind. I have seen death only on TV, and thus I have never connected with death as a reality, as something that actually happens. I've never seen a dead body, been to a funeral, or experienced any of my pets die (except for one hamster that I didn't like much). So I feel strangely ambivalent about death. It has no face to me. I've been sad when people I know die, but I have never really understood what that means, on some elemental level, beyond the fact that I will never see them again.

I would like to think that I am not afraid to die, that I can see death as part of the cycle, and thus an extension of life. But how can I know? Life has never seemed fragile to me. Ali's death is no closer to me than the news of 58 protesters being killed in Guinea. Yet I knew and loved Ally personally. I will not be at her funeral, nor will I have contact with her family after today. Just like I won't attend the funeral of people I didn't know in Guinea.

But that is not to say I am not sad, or moved in anyway. It is simply that my feelings are confusing to me, rather than clearly 'sadness' or 'loss', because I don't know what that means beyond knowing I will never see her again.

But there is another element to death in the age of internet. I have now put her memory in cyberspace, which will exist so long as we generate electricity and have the ability to understand it. She also has a facebook page, which at the moment of posting, has yet to acknowledge her passing. Thus she is not dead in that space. Hmm, feels strange to write these words, almost as if it were a disrespect to her or her family. See, I am making her death into an academic thing, making weird arguments about facebook defining life and death.

Allison Wills was my 6th grade Social Studies teacher, and my 7th grade English teacher in Munich. She was a great person who was not confined to arbitrary boundaries of politeness in the class room. We were free to address topics that some thought inappropriate; she removed taboos for us hormone-saturated teenagers. She died of cancer. I knew for a year that she had it, but I never thought she would die.