The Happy Birthday of Death

Remembering some loved ones

The young Michael Brownstein, photographed by Allen Ginsberg

Over the last few months, a number of significant, mostly beloved people in my life have passed away. I keep feeling that I want to write about each of them here, to commemorate them in some way… to sprinkle a handful of words over them that will, also, I know, soon be forgotten. Let me name those who are on my mind at this moment: poet Michael Brownstein (archive of his work here), poet and author Hettie Jones (archive here), editor Ken Jordan, filmmaker/farmer/Jewish mystic Baruch Thaler… I feel I am missing a few.

Inevitably, of course, this run of deaths brings up larger questions about the purpose and mystery of life. Also, I sense we are going through a major cultural death — a collective “vibe shift” — at the moment: The death of any illusions we might have held about our system or even, perhaps, our future on this planet. For me, these individual deaths populate the internal landscape of that greater, more engulfing grief I still can’t really bear to hold, can only touch upon.

The human mind is engineered for hope: Maintaining a hopeful and positive outlook in dark times is a necessary survival strategy that served us well over the long bumpy course of our evolutionary trajectory. Unfortunately, it can also lead us to make false suppositions, to hold onto obsolete notions that no longer correspond to the actual state of things.

As we get older, life gets smaller — in slow degrees — and the aperture of death widens, becomes bigger. This, in itself, is quite a fascinating process. When people are in their twenties, they tend to feel vaguely immortal and impervious. There seems a very large — an almost infinite — amount of time to explore and discover. Life seems much bigger than death: In terms of psychological proportion, life feels like a big beachball while death is a little golfball, or a speck on the edge of the horizon that keeps growing.

I remember one of the first times that death interrupted my immersive life-dream-scape. Bobby, a friend from college — not a close friend, but someone I liked, as I remember he was already focused in human rights, wanted to help the world — traveled during the winter break to San Francisco. He saw a couple fighting on the sidewalk. He went over to them to try to help the woman and the man took out a knife and stabbed him to death. Just like that, at nineteen years old, he was gone from the world, forever.

These days, when I think about death, I think about dark matter and dark energy. We know basically nothing about dark matter and dark energy, but it makes up the vast majority of the universe.