Mortality, and immortality

I've been thinking about death a lot lately. Not in any morbid, macabre, suicidal way--don't worry, I'm not going to off myself with my Gillette Venus any time soon. Maybe it would be more accurate to say I've been thinking a lot about mortality lately. Death in the detached intellectual abstract rather than the in-your-face reality of it that far too many people are far too familiar with. Luckily for me, I'm not one of them. Most of my experiences come from books rather than real life, something that can be frustrating at times but which I'm grateful for at others. This is one of those. To me, death is a concept rather than a reality.

I've always had the Hamlet problem; I think too much. And now I've been reading too much with too much time for thinking. I like my job, but it usually doesn't require a large amount of brain use (gotta love menial, manual labor), leaving far too much time for my thoughts to wander off in different directions. Also, the very nature of my workplace leads my cogitations down this particular path. I work at an assisted living retirement home. NOT a nursing home; most of the residents maintain the majority of their physical and mental acuities. The thing is, while all are mobile and some are positively spry, with mostly complete memories and active brains, they are still old and getting older. Occasionally we lose residents to the hospital or the nursing home. We rarely lose them straight to death, but it has happened. When I'm there, I can never forget that death is waiting for them, and every step they take brings them closer to it. None seem to fear it, in fact most are ready, or at least resigned. Some even seem to welcome it, as they have lost spouses who they believe are waiting for them in another life. Don't get me wrong, as I write this. I LOVE the residents, I truly do, I enjoy joking around with them and hearing their stories, and I'll be sad to leave them when I finally get a job. But the fact that I just can never seem to shut my mind off makes getting to know them rather bittersweet. The straight truth is, you never know if they'll be there the next day when you show up for work.

If I've learned one thing from my time there, it's this: I never want to get old. It's miserable and humiliating and sad. That thought has led my twisting and turning musings down one particular road I never thought they would go: that maybe it is better to die young and vital, in your prime. Now, don't think I'm convinced of this, because I'm definitely not. I think it's always better to live than die; that to die young is the worst tragedy in the world. But I'm starting to understand a concept that just never made any sense to me before.

There is this idea of a "glorious death" that constantly appears and reappears in history, in literature, in art, everywhere. It's even in the recent "Lord of the Rings" movies. I first ran across this particular idea in an ancient Greek lit class I took at the local college my senior year of high school. It is one of the resounding themes of The Iliad, appearing on page after page, interwoven so thoroughly into the story that there is no separating the two. The basic tenet is that according to contemporary thought, it was better to die young and strong and vital in the heat of battle, than to slowly wither away of old age. And it wasn't just the Greeks. This idea has popped up numerous times in my history classes, showing up in ancient Rome, with the Vikings in Scandinavia, in Renaissance-era Britain. Even now, among soldiers fighting modern wars. And each time, I thought that was crazy. It's always better to live than to die, right? But now, I don't know. Maybe I've gained some wisdom in the ensuing six years, or just learned to validate opposing opinions. At any rate, I understand the concept better now. I still don't quite agree with it, but I understand it and can even sympathize with it.

The best example of it is Achilles, from The Iliad. In fact, he's pretty much the ultimate example. His mother, the goddess Theta, offers him a choice: to go to Troy and fall in battle but have his name live on in immortality, or to not go to Troy, live a long and full life, have lots of children, and die peacefully in his bed. If any of you have seen the movie "Troy" you know which option Achilles chooses. He believes it's better to die valiantly in the prime of life and be remembered forever for it, than to live to a ripe old age and die "shamefully" in bed. I always thought he was crazy.

After working at the retirement home for 9 months, it's finally starting to make sense.