A drop of water falling back into the ocean, remember you are dust and to dust you shall return, memento mori. These popular, spiritual, and religious sayings get at the nature of what I'm about to tell you, but I'll bet you still balk at the idea of being honored to die. It is, of course, the foundation of fear of the unknown. The final goodbye to everything you have ever known - the end of all of your relationships - and it will come for you no matter what you do, no matter how far you run. And no matter how you prepare, it may come unexpectedly. How can such a horror, this base, humbling experience be an honor? How can we meet it with more grace and less fear? And why would I be arguing in its favor? Don't I know how painful it is to lose someone?

On that last point, I won't relay my personal losses like some kind of weird grief resume, but I will say this: my losses became more manageable in my day-to-day life when I expanded my acceptance for death. Not because this eased the pain of loss, but because it helped reframe exactly what I'd lost loved ones to. Like many mourners, I cast around for ways to understand what had happened to my loved ones, and, by extension, what would one day happen to me. I became fascinated with the myriad ways different cultures frame death, how we mourn, how we grieve. Ultimately, among these often fraught but no less beautiful ways to grieve, it was a common through-line that ended up changing my perspective.

In all of these disparate practices, beliefs about immortal souls or reincarnation, at the core was the understanding of what happens to the physical body. Whether or not you believe life goes on after death, we're united in the simple fact that the physical body experiences physical death.

Maybe this seems obvious, but it's this common consensus that feels radical to me. We're in a deeply divided time and nothing will sour a relationship like differences in religious belief. Something as fundamental to religion as what happens when we die - an issue that has inspired so many great schisms - is fertile ground for further misunderstanding and conflict. And yet death remains, a biological reality held in common. So what's left when we leave the religious dogma to the side for now? Can this topic, which often inspires so much debate, bring us together?

I think it can, if we focus hard on what we already agree on. And death, in its one act of kindness, provides just that. When someone dies, their physical body is left behind. We can disagree about what comes after that, spiritually, but a corpse is a reality we cannot deny. And what we do with corpses - burials, cremation, and more - is how we deal with another fundamental fact: our bodies return to the earth and decompose into requisite parts that once made them up. All of the matter that we're made of eventually goes back into the earth from whence we came. Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

This cycle, of course, can be interrupted by some of our behaviors around death - embalming and the like - but even these methods cannot delay this transformation forever.

Now, in accepting death as a cycle and being more "death positive," I don't mean that anyone should be rushing to the finish line. If anything, this philosophy about death makes me value my life all the more. If my existence is owed to the earth and I have just a short time before I'll go back to it, I find this motivates me to make the most of this limited time. It makes life itself a little more profound. And when the time comes, inevitably, to say goodbye to someone I love, I can grieve them knowing their cycle is ending - and beginning anew.

For me, personally, there is no religious component to this, but that doesn't mean I haven't assigned it any meaning. I am humbled by this connection to the earth, in awe of its undeniable reality. My life is wholly comprised of all that I have taken from the earth since the moment I was born. Moreover, it's made of what my parents and their parents, back through the centuries, have taken from the earth. Every inch I've grown, every bite I've ever eaten, every stitch of clothing on my back, every plank making up my home - all of it was provided for me. I may have put in some work to acquire these things, but I didn't create the matter they're made of. Death made that matter, or rather, the cycle of life and death made those requisite parts available for me to use.

So seeing that, how could I be anything but grateful to return to that cycle? I mean to make the most of these gifts of life, but when I die my requisite parts will go on to create new lives. It's not eternal life as promised by some faiths, but it's close enough for me.

Some further reading:

The Summer Day, Mary Oliver

From Here to Eternity (and more books), Caitlin Doughty

Epilogue: Returning the Gift, from Braiding Sweetgrass, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer

What do you think? Does this framing fit into your perspective? What does it feel like to picture your place in this cycle?

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