In the movie Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood's character is asked at one
point what he knows about life and what he knows about death. Seems
like an interesting question for anyone to answer. So I'll give it a
shot.
One thing I am sure of about life is that it has no
inherent meaning. Nothing that applies to everyone universally anyway.
Oh sure, there are some common themes like finding your work, starting a
family, and that sort of thing, but they sure as hell don't apply to
everyone. From a biological perspective, you don't really exist for any
reason beyond perpetuating your genes. If that's really what life is
all about, I already plan to fail, because there's another truth about
life that I'm sure about. Reality is a suffering pit. Sure, we
distract ourselves with pleasures of the flesh, pleasures of the mind,
and the few moments of happiness we manage to eke out, but, on the
whole, suffering pit. From the moment we wake up and stub our toe on
the nightstand or bump into furniture because we're still drowsy to the
moment we go to bed at night with our feet hurting, or a pain shooting
up a leg, or a headache, isn't it all just a demoralizing endless
struggle to escape the suffering? What else do you need to know about
life? Is there anything more of substance you could even come up with?
When most people think of death, I suppose concepts like fear
and sadness have close associations. Not for me. What I know about
death tells me that it is most often a mercy. Go visit a nursing home
and look real close at the vast majority of the patients in there. My
own grandmother was 102 when she died and she thought I was in in grade school. Another
woman in that same nursing home just sat there in her wheelchair with her hair cocked to the side
with drool coming out that nurses occasionally come by and wipe up.
One woman was screaming at the top of her lungs begging to be killed.
Living is no mercy for these people, but a form of purgatory. They're
biologically functioning, but they cannot live anymore. Shadows of
their former selves, they live as ghosts looking out on a world through
windows and televisions that they might as well be viewing through the
ether for all they can interact with it anymore. While our lives are
filled with eating out, talking with friends, and being productive,
theirs are lives of bedpans, aches and pains, bigass pills, and hoping
each time they fall asleep will finally be the time they won't wake up.
Death is not the enemy, but the one mercy and the one thing of true
democracy and equality we can all expect to find. People have been
amazed by me because I do not fear death because it is simply the
unknown. The unknown does not scare me. This world of endless stupid
struggle, that scares me, and whatever death is, it is not that.
-Frank
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