What colour is Death?

Death walks close by from time to time.

Close enough for me and Death to nod to each other in passing.

I don’t mean those times when Death, though not coming for me, nevertheless knocked me over as it swept by. I mean those occasions when there is a sadness, a sense of irrevocable loss. Possibly it may be tinged with relief; somebody’s suffering is at an end even as I know other someones, closer than me, are starting a different phase of their suffering.

Today is such a day for me. And whilst I’m largely wide open, willing to share the vulnerability of my inner life in my writing here, today and in this post is not the time or place where I choose to share personal aspects of my relationship with a relative who has just died. That is for me and for those far more impacted than I who must carry on and it remains private.

But I am aware that it is a trigger for reflection, on life (and death)—it’s a time to be a tad philosophical and allow myself to notice whether perhaps some of the things that I thought were important actually have any significance at all.

Advance notice

More than a quarter of a century ago now, someone told me that I was going to die. Intellectually I already knew this – who of us isn’t? But in this case the someone was a consultant haematologist and he’d just told me that I had a form of leukaemia. Among the predictable images that careered into my mind at that time, in a sense of detachment that I would come to know as dissociation, the quietly stoical hero came to the fore. “How long have I got, Doc?“. Yes, I actually did ask this. I was on my own. The only part of his reply that I took with me out of the consulting room was a statistic; more than half of people in the United Kingdom who are diagnosed with this form of leukemia died within five years and almost all die within ten.

I was age 44, contemplating the fact that I probably wouldn’t make 54.

(Author’s note: The haematologist probably said more than this. I have realised since that very few people of my age are ever diagnosed with this form of leukaemia, it being something identified in people who are already 30 years older than I was then. But if he did, I didn’t hear any of it on that dull, rainy day in Aberdeen.)

I was lucky. Serendipity and synchronicities kept cropping up in my life as I prepared for my death. And look: I’m still here, fit as a plant-based food manufacturer’s dog.

What happened loosened my grasp on conventional, science-based understanding of life, the universe and everything. But that is a whole other tale, for another time.

Knowledge, huh, what is it good for? Absolutely …

The reflective mood today left me wondering about this science thing.

Take just one small part of our knowledge.

The Earth, our planet, goes around the Sun, our star, right? Assuming you regard our sun as relatively static, of course.

Collectively, we got past the idea that everything “up there” goes around where we live. We came up with descriptions of how this works. Some of our descriptions were so good that we thought of them as explanations. There was gravity. Followed by space and time, curved by mass as if we were all living on some giant distorted rubber sheet. We had the maths that worked out so perfectly we knew we were on to something.

We worked out how to predict the paths of the planets across the night sky pretty accurately against the passage of the time that we’d invented. Our new knowledge meant we could do away with the ever decreasing circles of numerous epicycles. And when we couldn’t describe some of the planetary wanderings in an explanatory sort of way, there were always more assumptions, axioms, and, when all else failed, Dark Stuff.

Better yet, where we were prepared to accept that we didn’t reasonably know, there was (drum roll) … belief! In fact, we generated a seemingly infinite universe of beliefs. These came in different flavours, too; myths, faiths, philosophies. Out of either our knowledges and/or our beliefs, we created stories, teachings, religions, cultures and cults.

(Not to mention ideologies, political systems, categories and collective labels, all of which have the advantage of saving time by describing whole chunks of experience together and treating all elements within as if they were one thing. We can then choose to belong to some categories, under an overarching label of “”we” and thereby class everything outside that as “other”. On a good day we can savour the differences between us and them and have a nice time. Other days, bad days, we go to war with “them”, one way or another.)

Back to our celestial systems.

I digress; let’s get back to knowing some answers and pondering some questions.

Has our knowledge—that the Earth goes around the Sun and not the other way round—made any difference to how we respond to our existential experience? Have the seasons altered in their regularity now that we know this? Do the tides rise and fall to a different rhythm? (Importantly - has it changed the quality of the astrological horoscopes to which some of us attach so much meaning?)

Oh hang on. The moon, the bringer of tides, actually does go round the Earth. We know that, don’t we? At least we know it does if we ignore our knowledge that we know Earth is really spinning and spiralling through space in some complex cosmic spiralling route around a star on an outer arm of a respectably sized galaxy and instead regard our Earth as relatively static.

So what?

Haven’t we improved our lot with this extra knowledge? Solved the origin of the universe? Understood how life works? Mapped out the future? Built civilisations, cities, communities? Eliminated smallpox? Cured countless infections? Landed on the Moon? Found ways to feed everyone, maintain peace, foster wellbeing for everyone?

I mean, at best, it’s patchy, isn’t it?

And finally, on this sombre day

What colour is Death?

I mean what colour is the actual word ‘DEATH’ for you?

For me it’s black, with an edging of glimpsed, bleached-bone white. Doubtless inspired by imagery of tall hooded skeletons wielding glitteringly sharp scythes but for me, the colours are synaesthetically associated with the word.

You?

Normal service will be exhumed next week.