dying for a rare form of dementia.

it was of course sad to hear of terry jones’ death. as one of the stars of the monty python movies, i adored him. but it was the fact that he’d been suffering from a rare form of dementia that honestly fascinated me. i mean, is it to his credit that his dementia was rare? is it almost to be expected that someone so uncommonly funny would end up with an uncommonly rare form of dementia? 

hardly two days earlier, a friend sent me a video to watch, of a ninenty-seven-year-old man talking about his impending death. i doubt that it was a tremendously popular video. i doubt it ever went viral or that hollywood was interested. it certainly wasn’t worthy of a python skit. but in fact i really appreciated it. 

the old guy’s name was mr. fingarette, a professor of philosophy, obviously an intelligent person who‘d written several books during his lifetime. one of those books even specifically argued that it was irrational to fear death, a hypothesis that during the video he admitted was wrong. at least, he said, that right or wrong he finds himself fearing death and definitely not wanting to die. and personally i feel that’s where he put his fingarette right on the point.

anyone who knows me knows i’ve spent my adulthood as a student of life: a meditator, philosopher of sorts, a mystic of sorts. and as i approach my seventieth year one thing i can say with absolute certainty, after all these years seeking truth and knowledge: i’d really rather not die. at the very same time i also know with absolute certainty that the other shoe is gonna drop, so to speak. it may be sooner or later, but it’s a coming. 

that being said, the questions i find myself asking are: ‘how can i fully live the time i still have? what might i do to make a difference? how can i make more of a mark?’ and the answers i find myself continuously coming up with are: ‘there’s nothing more i really wanna do. there’s no reason to try making a difference and there’s no reason to try making more of a mark.’ in short, there’s nothing one can or perhaps should do, just live and then die. 

i happen to be a writer so i write. however, in all honesty i don’t have anything new to say. great writers, philosophers and mystics, much greater than me, have pretty much said it all. great world-changers have tried and failed to be immortalized by making their mark. and so i come inexorably back to simply stopping, mostly meditating. i come inexorably back to the honourable practice of letting go. there’s a space, a state within deep meditation in which desires and fears cease to persist, the questions stop, in which one dissolves into an ocean of blissful acceptance. 

great saints and sages have talked about that state all through the ages. i’m unable or unwilling to confirm their alleged findings. i only know that it seems to be a state that leaves one marginally better able to deal with ones impending demise. it seems to be an answer unformed, an acceptance undefined. perhaps that’s what’s left to do: to die with a rare form of dementia.