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I suppose dying is something like an eclipse.
At least the eclipse I saw.
It was Monday, on North Clinton. I had walked out there, away from the hoopla, into the neighborhood. I stood between Don Samuel Torres Park, a broad expanse of deserted grass anchored by a corner where they sell drugs, and Los Flamboyanes, the subsidized apartment tower that is the capital of La Avenida. I went there because I wanted to see something beautiful in a place where I had seen so much ugly; I went there because I wanted to experience a real phenomenon among real people.
It was a wonder and a terror. A stunning, awe-inspiring event that made you feel powerless and vulnerable, as the shadow of the moon changed the tenor of the day, stealing the sun and cooling the air and reminding you that you and your kind are not in control.
The clouds were dark and low and of unusual contour, illuminated as they never are and, consequently, appearing as they never do, like something out of a science fiction movie, just before the lightning starts and the alien craft descends. The darkness swept in from the southwest and the gulls flew and screamed above Clinton and Upper Falls and most of the couple dozen people I could see raised their glowing phones to the sky.
The blackness flooded in, the headlights and streetlights suddenly ablaze, and the day fled to the northeast as the night consumed us from the southwest. So quickly and so disorientingly that it was hard to see and feel everything that was happening, to observe the totality of totality. It was like the wave pool at Seabreeze when the water lifts you and carries you and you are momentarily powerless in its grip, part of the flotsam of the universe.
It never was totally dark, though it was momentarily very close, as night moved inexorably from one direction, crowding out the light, there appeared from whence it had come the slightest sliver of light, along the far horizon, at the moment it consumed the horizon ahead. As darkness seemed to declare its victory, another light grew, and grew, as the umbra moved to parts unknown and the new light and the new day pushed it faster and farther away.
And then it wasn’t dark anymore.
And the street lights went off and the air began to warm and the people went back inside.
And I walked back to work thinking about it.
About how I imagine death is like that.
We are powerlessly swept away, in something beyond our control and understanding, and as the light fades, as it is seemingly extinguished, it dawns anew and triumphant, and life goes on.
Our contemplations of death are based in fear and faith, in varying proportions. We believe and we project but we don’t know. Some see oblivion and some see awaiting loved ones. Walking to the light or walking into darkness. The end of this life or the end of all life. Faith is a foundation or a fabrication, ultimate truth or ultimate delusion, and planted in our hearts by Darwin or God are the seeds of faith and the instinct to live. Humankind has an impulse to worship and an imperative to avoid death, to fear it and fight it and see it around every corner.
Perhaps faith exists as anesthesia for our comprehension of our ultimate demise; perhaps the terror of death exists to make our walk of faith truly a walk of faith.
But either way, nobody’s gone and come back except Jesus, and he didn’t tell us what it was like.
So we walk through life and we walk up North Clinton and sometimes we think about it, and sometimes we can’t stop thinking about it.
And Monday after the light came back, that’s what I thought, that maybe dying is something like an eclipse.
There is the gathering darkness and the powerlessness and the terror and just at its peak the gathering dawn.
A new light much like the old light.