Let Us Discuss, If We May, Mortality

So deep! Mortality!

Mortality is, without a doubt, one of the things you think more about when you get back from a trip to Africa. It comes at you double sided. Firstly, you are thinking about mortality because you've just come back from somewhere where 45 is considered old. OLD. And you have already started spurting out that "forty is the new thirty!" But you're faced with the fact that, whether you squeeze out the extra years afforded by American medicine or not, life is short.

Then you are hit with pondering mortality because you can't help but come back from there thinking about what you really want to leave behind when you go. What do you really want to do that will have left things better than you found them?

And, of course, when you start thinking about those two things, you start thinking about the nature of physical life altogether.

And because the Universe likes to fit things together, you then start watching season three of Northern Exposure, which is the season where the writers were clearly preoccupied with the idea of mortality.

The first episode is called The Body in Question. In it, Chris, the subconscious voice of the show, discovers the frozen body of a historic Frenchman while fishing. The body also has a preserved diary that implies that the Frenchman had traveled to Alaska with Napoleon, who was seeking to sire a child after Josephine failed to give him children, and that Napoleon was never actually at Waterloo. During the episode, the town struggles with the possibility of improving their financial lot by opening a museum versus the greater historical and spiritual consequences if the rest of the world were to know that Waterloo wasn't as Waterloo is believed to be.

The episode ends with a native tribe, the Tellakutans, coming to reclaim the body, which to them is a mythological hero as it is believed that Napoleon actually fathered a child with one of their tribe females. As the episode closes, the Native Americans row away in the mist on a canoe with the body of the frozen legend, and Chris reads the following Proust excerpt (from Remembrance of Things Past) over the radio:

"When from a long distant past nothing persists, after the people are dead, after things are broken and scattered, still alone, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long, long time like souls, ready to remind us, waiting, hoping for their moment amid the ruins of all the rest, and bear unfaltering in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence the vast structure of recollection."

I mean, firstly, before we even discuss, let's take a moment to just soak in how brilliant and wonderful and amazing Proust is.

There are many takeaways from that episode. But to me, at this moment, where I am in my head and my soul, the contrast between the two types of things you can leave behind is so stark. You can leave something big and massive. The kind of thing that will change history and make a town want to create a museum for you. Or, you can leave something that contributes a memory or a belief or a particle into the "vast structure of recollection". Something that feels small but that would make a tiny tribe of Indians in the expansive North travel for days in a canoe to take you back home. In short, something that will cause somebody, even just one person, to be inspired and to care. To love, really.

And really, you can do that every day.

You should find that episode. It is brilliant in the way it unravels to that powerful last moment with the canoe and this crazy philosophical radio DJ reading Proust to a town of 1300 people in the middle of Alaska.

After another episode passes, there is another exploration of mortality. This episode is called A-Hunting We Will Go.

When I say that, you probably think that it's obvious that the element of mortality being dealt with in that episode is about hunting. And that's definitely part of it: the struggle that Joel faces with killing animals and the emotional turmoil he goes through trying to preserve the life of a bird he shot. Really, you could write an entire paper on the multiple levels on which mortality is explored in this episode, but I don't have that in me right now! Instead, I'll sum up the key story that drew me in. There is an older woman, Ruthann, in the show. She's in her seventies, in fact in this episode she has her seventy-second birthday. And she is friends with Ed, who is a wandering twenty-something. During the episode, Ed becomes obsessed with the fact that Ruthann is old and will die soon. And there are lots of plot turns involving that, but in the end, he throws her a birthday party - to celebrate how alive she is. At the birthday party, he tells her that the next day he will take her to show her what he got her for her birthday.

He has gotten her a spot of land, high up on an Alaskan mountain with a beautiful view. It's for her grave, when the time comes. And then, they are standing there. And I may get the quotes slightly off here, but Ed says to Ruthanne, "What do you want to do now?" And she says, "Dance."

Ed looks at her quizzically.

"I want to dance, Ed. I want to dance on my grave. How many people ever get the chance to do that?"

And as the show ends, the camera pans out and up into the sky above them as Ed and Ruthann dance on top of the grave she'll one day occupy. And they are happier than you can imagine.

And what's so powerful to me about that episode is that I kind of feel like that's my philosophy every day anyway. Even if I can't dance "on my grave" I really try to live every day so that eventually I will have lived it as much as possible. I will have danced on my grave in all the metaphorical ways that count. I will not have missed a minute of the dancing, or of the living.

And it's perfect universal timing that I came home from Africa and those two episodes were on. Because they put me back into healthy places about remembering how I want to live. You can't help but come back from Africa and want to do something BIG to make the world better, but the most important thing is to make the world better in small ways every day. Inspire girls who wouldn't go to college to go to college by being there for them every day, for example. Give love freely because people are short on it. Be generous of emotion and time. All of those things that I try to incorporate into my life anyway.

And you can only do that if you live like you're dancing on your grave every day. If you're not alive, how can you make other people feel alive? Live every moment.

It's completely odd that I'm saying that Northern Exposure snapped me out of my post-Africa depression and affirmed all the things that I think are so important about the way I need to live if I'm following my right path, but it did.