I am 75 years old, healthy, and have never spent much time worrying about death. When I’ve thought about it at all, it was either as an impenetrable mystery or the void of non-existence—neither of which seem particularly terrifying, interesting, nor worthy of much attention. But, as I age, the passing of friends, family, and cultural figures who have shaped my mind and the emergence of age-related infirmities make it impossible for me to avoid death’s encroachment.
I am a scientist and a humanist. Although this deprives me of religion’s ready-to-wear consolations, it has given me a lifelong involvement with philosophy, science, literature, art, and music to draw upon. I’ve even borrowed ideas from spiritual thinkers such as Lao Tzu, Buddha, and Jesus while avoiding the dogmas that exploit their teachings. These secular and spiritual thinkers offer a remarkably consistent and compelling set of principles for understanding life and its ending. However, I still long for some personal, emotional complement to the abstractions of logic and philosophy. I feel like a musician who works to transform notes written on paper into sounds etched in the soul.
Lately, as I’ve contemplated these questions, I’ve become aware of a presence at the edge of my consciousness. Although a product of my mind, this presence remains apart from logic and the intellect: unseen but pervasive, mysterious but reassuring, alien but intimate and, above all, feminine. I have come to think of this presence as the Dark Lady, and she has become the fixed point in my efforts to face my mortality. She is not a spirit, angel, ghost, messenger from God, or other transcendent entity. She is a metaphor, a personification of the ideas, narratives, and longings surrounding my thoughts about life and death. She is no less meaningful for that. The Dark Lady is the emotional resonance of philosophy’s abstract constructions, situating them in flesh, blood, nerve, and bone.
I don’t know why this specific metaphor emerged from my thinking or how it has captured me so powerfully. Perhaps the Dark Lady reflects a deeply rooted, masculine desire for connection with the feminine. Perhaps she offers the comfort of a woman’s touch, giving me the courage to think about the unthinkable, to write about that which defies articulation, and to avoid the loneliness that can accompany such ruminations. Perhaps she is simply a manifestation of the sexual and perceptual dispositions that define me as a man.
Whatever her origins, the Dark Lady has given me a perspective that is simultaneously intimate and beyond my time-bound experience. She has helped me recognize that birth, life, and death define a universal pattern of existence, which I share with all the creatures who have ever lived, even with stars and galaxies. A star is born in the collapse of stellar gas and dust to initiate a fusion reaction. Over its life, the star fuses subatomic particles into heavier elements until it dies in a nova, casting those elements into the void to form new stars, planets, and the chemical reactions we call life. We are born of dying stars to repeat these endless cycles of birth and death.
This pattern enfolds and defines us. A painter or sculptor irrevocably alters the form of their materials through the creative act—entropy prevents the paint from separating into its component pigments; it prevents the statue from returning to the granite block that had yet to feel the sculptor’s chisel. Every living creature’s birth initiates countless biochemical processes that transform the infant into an adult, to participate in endless cycles as a parent, a friend, a thinker, a leader, or a builder, to live until age and death make their inevitable appearance—even writing this essay spawns cycles of creation and destruction, forcing me to alter my thinking to fit the constraints of language, subtly changing my logic and attitudes, and leaving my mind and brain transformed.
This pattern of birth, growth, and death is a natural process that enfolds everyone equally. As I continue my life, as I grow in experience and hopefully wisdom, my body and mind continue their decline, like successive photocopies of an increasingly unrecognizable image. These cycles of life and death are beyond good and evil, reward and punishment, fear and desire. There is no heaven, no hell, no judgment day, no bardo, no angels or devils awaiting hapless souls—only endless interconnected patterns of creation, change, and destruction.
This is where the Dark Lady grants her unique gift. She has helped me stop thinking about death as an inexorable predator coming from the darkness to end my life. Death is a natural part of my life cycle, like being born, developing into an adult, learning, creating, loving, teaching, ageing, and dying. But, although the cycle of birth and death is universal, every instance of this cycle, whether in a star, a planet, an animal, or a human, is personal and unique. My death, like my life, is mine alone to experience. No philosopher, holy man, or teacher can walk that path beside me. I alone determine the actions and attitudes that will shape the contours of my dying.
The Dark Lady is a source of serenity among these swirling, entangled cycles of birth and death. She cannot erase the fear, anger, regret and grief I feel when contemplating the end of my life. Still, she does show me that my death—like my life—is more than an impersonal ripple through the waters of reality. My life and death are the songs I—and I alone—compose from the harmonics of my soul. She has shown me that the way to rob death of its power is to affirm all that is unique and valuable in living, in the particulars of one’s own life—the triumphs and failures, the loves and losses, the successes and regrets that define each of us. By living fully and joyfully to the end, I take possession of my death as I have of my life. It becomes my final act of creation.
I have lived as a creative person: a craftsman, writer, musician, engineer, and teacher. Countless repetitions of creative acts, large and small, have made the processes of creativity as natural and integral to me as breathing. Like Homer’s Muse, the Dark Lady is there when I write, play music, cook, fix up my house, love those dear to me, and seek joy and discovery. With her help, I will continue these small acts of creation until my life dissolves in the eddies of birth and destruction that define existence.
