children are cursed with a sense of permanence. what little they perceive they perceive to be permanent, especially their own lives, or rather their own existence. their existence begins at birth, but their life begins when they realize the difference, that someday they will die. it is often when they learn that the sun will implode in several billion years that they learn their mortality. though the impending heat death is not until an eternity, to a new mind that eternity ends tomorrow. as they age, more encounters with death cruelly teach them that they are no exception, until it becomes an existential malaise. that is the very definition of humanity.
i am still learning what it means to be human, and what i can make of my own vulnerability. i am still learning what others make of theirs. constant exposure to the evils of the world means the bell is always tolling; witnessing a genocide as it unfolds is brutally sobering. we are living in an era of raw doom. i am not alone in feeling as though death is consuming my mind more than it ever has. i once gave no second thought to headlines of unfamiliar celebrities passing, but now they give me overwhelming pause. the death of their visible persona had superseded the death of the person it belonged to; their entire existence began and ended in the pronouncement of their deaths. lately, that facade has fallen away, and i can't help but grieve as though i had known them. i’ve been feeling an indescribable closeness with humanity itself, and that i lose another part of myself at the knowledge of another death, with a radical disregard to whose it was.
as i watched the excruciating presidential debate, i was fixed on joe biden. comments on his mental state are only ever made for quick political points, but watching him falter moved me in a way i hadn’t known before. at every moment his eyes averted to nothing, i could feel mine well up. i forgot the persona and the politics and imagined the fear i would feel if i knew my mind was decaying; i began to weep. i felt as though i was watching a man die by my hands. the ballot is his slow death.
i chronically relive the moment i realized my own mortality, each time as profound as the first. when i look at joe biden, i see the face of death. when i see the face of death, i see myself. but along with the strange liberation i found in death i found an even stranger motivation. death is my impetus and my muse. but to contemplate death is to simultaneously contemplate life. death imparts meaning to life. the innocent sense of permanence that captivated my childhood gave way to something more grim and more rich. my fixation on death led me to discover this deep, transcendental connection to humanity. the reality of the debate is that we only have each other in this life.
i am grieving for things that aren’t gone. i cried when my refrigerator was replaced. i can’t believe that grief is the final form of love when i feel i have so much more love to give yet grief precedes it. i can’t stop thinking about what will happen if my loved ones die. what little i know about my paternal grandfather is that he was a bigoted and hateful man. he was a chain smoker. he spent the last years of his life breathing out of an oxygen tank as a punishment for his cruelty, to his family and to himself. he didn’t look at me when i visited. and yet my father still cried when he passed. i hold him more closely when i replay that day in my mind.
i learned then that in an enduring love, nothing cannot be forgiven. i know who joe biden is and i know what he has done. i cannot forgive the politician for the dying man. but to me joe biden was never more wholly a person than he was on television that night. i am irreparably indebted to those who understand me; i look at joe biden and i see a man who is not understood. i think the most horrible things about the people i love and love them anyway. i want to be accepted for my flaws and not in spite of them. i can’t think to do anything else for anyone. this oceanic feeling is a sharp and unbounded pain. freud named this feeling an infant consciousness. i am again a child, unable to distinguish myself from my surroundings, knowing love as my only guidance.
thomas friedman urged joe biden to step down. he wrote that the biden family must have the hardest of conversations with the president, a conversation of love and clarity and resolve. we love things that tend towards decay. we watch them as they do. the bleak aftermath of the debate was ubiquitous; we are never more united than in fear and uncertainty. the stakes of this election are insurmountably high not because our humanity depends on it but because it depends on our humanity. we are accounting for just how much we are willing to sacrifice. we are staring at our own mortality, setting the world on fire to keep each other warm.
