As I’m writing my memoir on Substack, I think about all of the different iterations of this “me” in this body. My “thinking” and “remembering” are contingent on the limitations therein. I post photos and it is comforting to watch “myself” grow i nto the “me” of today. I was born in 1952 and I’ve written up to 1994, so I have more years to contemplate ahead of me as I live in the present moment. As a retired hospice chaplain of 30 years, I’ve had lots of time to think about death and the sacredness of each individual person’s one life and one death. Mostly, I’ve come to the conclusion that after the body and mind quit, the rest is not my business.
I don't find this post bleak, Don, but it is a challenge for my "I" mentality. I acknowledged and accepted some time ago that it's not death I dread, it's dying, because the process of leaving what we know behind is often associated with pain and sadness. Can I get to a place of being at peace with those very human realities? I'm not sure.
I think I'm more at ease with the concept presented by Andrea Gibson, the phenomenal poet who passed away recently, in "Love Letter from the Afterlife." They are essentially saying the same thing, I think. We are always everywhere. We are each other. We are everything and nothing at all.
"My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive?"
I recently found this quote on fb and wondered why I hadn’t read or heard about her before. And now synchronistically, she popped in here. I love her approach about death. Also got goosebumps while reading this.
Andrea was...is...exceptionally insightful. Their Substack, still active now with help from their wife and others, is: "Things That Don't Suck" https://andreagibson.substack.com/ Their time in this dimension seems short compared to their outsized impact for good in this world. I agree -- goosebumps.
Great post and ideas, Don. I don't think I'm afraid of death...maybe at one time I was. I'm a realist, and know that we come and then we go. I find comfort in that, and the added bonus of poof, no more Don! I'll be thinking of you when I drive over the Bourne Bridge in 12 days! xo
If you take the exit on the north side of the Bourne and head toward the Sagamore instead (it's just as quick), you can take a little rest by the side of the canal. There's a great visitor center and some picnic tables, and a tremendous view. 😊
Sunday the 3rd and don't know what time is the best to leave my place. My check-in is at 3pm, but I'm good with traveling early am (if best) and hanging around places til I can land!
Sundays are fine for traveling onto Cape. The two canal-side roads, one on the north and one on the south, can still be a bit bound up, because people leaving the Cape will travel those roads, depending on which bridge they want to cross, but everything else should be fine for you, Nan.
The Bourne Bridge and the Sagamore Bridge were both built in 1935 as exact duplicates, so your just as safe on either one! 😊
Don - thanks once again for your honesty and wise words. I've been on Substack more than a year now and I think your posts are some of the most brutally honest stuff I read here. It is amazing to me how much you share! Also - I do not find this post depressing at all. This realization, this non-attachment to ego - is liberating! I call this the lava lamp life: every once in awhile a blob differentiates itself from the mass, rises up, has a brief singular period and then falls back to the lump, back to where it started. That is us, that is life. Brief, but beautiful!
Thank you, Scott, I really appreciate that. And I love the analogy!
One of my favorites is the waterfall analogy. The river is one. Then, as it’s airborne, it separates into droplets, and then it returns to itself and becomes one again. We are those droplets.
Beautiful post, Don. Looking at your great pictures you wouldn't think that the structure of that bridge would ever change, but it will someday. I don't know when it happened to you or if it has but I can remember turning 50 and thinking about my eventual demise. Just turned 68 and I hardly give it a thought these days. Perspective is a moving target and I love your perspective of just letting it go, holding on to life loosely. Thanks for this, Don.
Thank you so much, Steve! I don’t have a strong memory of when the idea of my own death first hit me as reality. Maybe it hasn’t yet! Or maybe I started practicing mindfulness just in time! (I’m 60).
This is not demoralizing or bleak at all! I love the way you incorporate your perspective into everyday happenings. It's really fascinating, actually. I would love to talk more about this with you, because I think about death a lot. Maybe it's because I used to be a grief writer/speaker, and I have heard a lot of stories about death and dying. Maybe it's because it's been acutely on my mind since Sarah's birth and I knew/know that people with her diagnosis can (and do) die out of nowhere, at any age, for any number of reasons.
That said, what fascinates me is that you wrote that your death wouldn't be a big deal for you, only for your wife and those who love you (like us!). Do you ever wonder what nonexistence is like, or have you simply come to terms with knowing you will not know until it happens? I try not to think about how or when I will die, though I do panic from time to time when I consider that my life is already half over (at least)--and that no one really knows when they will die, anyway, so my life might be MORE than half over. I don't like thinking about the possibility of pain or a long, lingering death. But really, I can't control how I will die or when, so I try to just surrender these worries into the ether. All I am given is this moment, anyway, and I don't want to squander it.
Jeannie, sorry this took me two days to reply! As always, I’m super grateful to you for your feedback and thought sharing. I’m looking forward to talking to you on Zoom soon!
…”and the thinking itself tells a story; I am me. Then it grows very attached to that story.”
And wasn’t it said that attachment is what causes all misery? And you even mention and allude to it.
Lots of food for thought here.
Wouldn’t to “just be” as one of those fragments are, would be as the creator—you, me, all of us—experiencing itself in and through all of us—at once—as all of creation. (?)
I don’t know if that made sense.
But I totally get the “HAHAHOHOHEEHEE” at the end! In fact I just heard that song a couple weeks ago. 😂
Thank you, Gail. I do think I understand your question. Are we both fragments of the universe and the whole universe at the same time, and are we the universe's desire to witness itself? Is that close? Of course, we can only speculate about an idea like that. It is a beautiful one! 💚
I think you may enjoy listening to NDE stories (near death experiences) although I like to call them actual death experiences. They put time here in this realm into a deeper perspective.
It will be like before I was born. Unimaginable, but not alarming. Before my birth, there were people who would know me and waited for the baby who could have been an infinitude of babies but turned out to be me.. A little farther back in time, there were no such people. The opposite process will occur when I die. People will remember and miss me (and maybe resent me) until there are none left.
I read this yesterday and had to come back and reread it today. Lots in here.
The first thing I thought of was a memory about the bridge collapse over the Mississippi River in MN almost 20 years ago. I had just moved to WI from MN. To this day, I think about that incident every time time I drive across a large bridge. So your opening storyline hit home!
I am not sure I agree about not being able to imagine our own non-existence. I need to think about this more. I feel like I can imagine that.
"Self is something we do, not something we are." More food for thought!
I don't fear death. I've already stood on that threshold thanks to cancer. I've thought about death and written about it, too. Many times. Mostly on my old blog. I posed a question on today's essay asking what your last conversation with yourself might be like. Maybe that's related to your piece in some way.
Thanks for a thought-provoking read. I might be back to read it yet again!
Thank you so much for reading and engaging, Nancy. I really appreciate it!
It’s subtle about imagining one’s own nonexistence. You can do it as long as you project yourself as another self in the scenario (the observer). Without an observer, there would be nothing, no thoughts, no feelings, no self. Not even blackness or emptiness. Just nothing.
This of course is only how I can describe things AS a self.
In actuality, I think the sense of self is just a limited faculty of this body, of consciousness. But I think we, as a piece of the whole universe, actually ARE the universe. Some say we are the universe’s desire to see itself. I would not say that because no one can know WHY we exist, but I do think we are the universe. So when this limited self goes away, what is left is what we always were, before we were born and after.
...I remembered that yesterday was Tuesday. We know what that means. You’ve trained me.:) I was just caught up in my own love troubles yesterday, but here I am...
I loved that part where you said the self is something we do. When I read something like that, I feel it in my body. And I agree, of course.
..then... that idea—that it’s hard or even impossible for us to think about our own disappearance—has also been circling in my mind recently.
...and until then, we’ll keep hanging out a little longer.
That is, at least those two entities we are doing, right?:)
Haha, you are absolutely correct, we shared some similarities in our posts yesterday :) I think there is something essential about laughing. There is an element of surrender to it! It's a testament to the human spirit's capacity to find lightness even in the darkest corners of contemplation. It suggests that perhaps true freedom lies not in conquering fear, but in befriending it, even laughing with it, as we journey through the undeniable flow of existence.
Hey, I got a question for you. Have you noticed a drop in engagement, even with some of your best essays? (I thought your most recent essay, the one I commented on, was really excellent.) At first I thought maybe I just wasn’t writing as engagingly as I used to, but it seems to be consistent; I’m getting about half as many likes as I used to on my newsletter posts.
Yep! A severe drop in my deliverability (currently 82%, down from 93%), open rate (currently 31%, down from 43%), and engagement (currently 18%, down from 29%). It's killing me! I really thought it was me, but the feedback I've been getting on my June Aliveness series and my July series (thank you for your feedback - I really loved my last essay too) has been exceptional.
Subscribers are down quite a bit too.
I don't feel like your writing has suffered. I have a bad case of ADHD, so I get bored easily :) Your essays are engaging as ever!
I have a suspicion that deliverability is part of the issue.
Oh, well that sounds like something out of anyone’s control. Would an email not reaching its intended inbox mean that the address is bad, or that the recipient has opted out of receiving emails, or some other reason?
It's heavily influenced by both our reputation and the sender email domain's reputation, along with various technical factors. Some issues are things that Substack doesn't allow us to change, which we can modify on other platforms, hence my partial dissatisfaction :).
Because we all send from a substack domain, we benefit but also get penalized. For newer and smaller substacks (in this case, we are technically "small"), we have an advantage. For larger and more established substacks, you lack the ability to build your own domain reputation. Substacks might have higher open rates and better engagement, which can improve deliverability compared to the average substack. They miss out.
For those with worse metrics, the benefits are tremendous.
Ah, so I think what you're saying is that the receiver's email platform (host?) may actually refuse or spam the email based on conditions such as you mention? Thank you, Alex.
Haha! That's okay. It is a simple but important metric. Deliverability refers to the percentage of emails that reach their intended recipients' primary mailboxes. When I send an email to subscribers (as opposed to a post), my deliverability is excellent. However, my regular posts have poor deliverability.
On my other email list on a different platform, I have a much larger list with a deliverability rate of 98%, which is on par with what I'm used to.
As I’m writing my memoir on Substack, I think about all of the different iterations of this “me” in this body. My “thinking” and “remembering” are contingent on the limitations therein. I post photos and it is comforting to watch “myself” grow i nto the “me” of today. I was born in 1952 and I’ve written up to 1994, so I have more years to contemplate ahead of me as I live in the present moment. As a retired hospice chaplain of 30 years, I’ve had lots of time to think about death and the sacredness of each individual person’s one life and one death. Mostly, I’ve come to the conclusion that after the body and mind quit, the rest is not my business.
I think that’s a really great outlook, Kathi! Not my business. How could it be our business if we have absolutely no way of knowing! Nice! 😊
I don't find this post bleak, Don, but it is a challenge for my "I" mentality. I acknowledged and accepted some time ago that it's not death I dread, it's dying, because the process of leaving what we know behind is often associated with pain and sadness. Can I get to a place of being at peace with those very human realities? I'm not sure.
I think I'm more at ease with the concept presented by Andrea Gibson, the phenomenal poet who passed away recently, in "Love Letter from the Afterlife." They are essentially saying the same thing, I think. We are always everywhere. We are each other. We are everything and nothing at all.
"My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive?"
That is certainly beautiful, Elizabeth. Thanks for sharing with me, and thanks for reading my essay! 🙏😊
I recently found this quote on fb and wondered why I hadn’t read or heard about her before. And now synchronistically, she popped in here. I love her approach about death. Also got goosebumps while reading this.
Andrea was...is...exceptionally insightful. Their Substack, still active now with help from their wife and others, is: "Things That Don't Suck" https://andreagibson.substack.com/ Their time in this dimension seems short compared to their outsized impact for good in this world. I agree -- goosebumps.
Great post and ideas, Don. I don't think I'm afraid of death...maybe at one time I was. I'm a realist, and know that we come and then we go. I find comfort in that, and the added bonus of poof, no more Don! I'll be thinking of you when I drive over the Bourne Bridge in 12 days! xo
Haha, thanks, Nan.
If you take the exit on the north side of the Bourne and head toward the Sagamore instead (it's just as quick), you can take a little rest by the side of the canal. There's a great visitor center and some picnic tables, and a tremendous view. 😊
Which bridge is at greater risk??? 🤪 And since when is the Bourne Bridge "quick?"
xo!
Ha ha, good point. Are you driving down on a Friday?
Sunday the 3rd and don't know what time is the best to leave my place. My check-in is at 3pm, but I'm good with traveling early am (if best) and hanging around places til I can land!
Sundays are fine for traveling onto Cape. The two canal-side roads, one on the north and one on the south, can still be a bit bound up, because people leaving the Cape will travel those roads, depending on which bridge they want to cross, but everything else should be fine for you, Nan.
The Bourne Bridge and the Sagamore Bridge were both built in 1935 as exact duplicates, so your just as safe on either one! 😊
Don - thanks once again for your honesty and wise words. I've been on Substack more than a year now and I think your posts are some of the most brutally honest stuff I read here. It is amazing to me how much you share! Also - I do not find this post depressing at all. This realization, this non-attachment to ego - is liberating! I call this the lava lamp life: every once in awhile a blob differentiates itself from the mass, rises up, has a brief singular period and then falls back to the lump, back to where it started. That is us, that is life. Brief, but beautiful!
Thank you, Scott, I really appreciate that. And I love the analogy!
One of my favorites is the waterfall analogy. The river is one. Then, as it’s airborne, it separates into droplets, and then it returns to itself and becomes one again. We are those droplets.
I don't know of a more important context for true aliveness than the reality of our eventual death. 🙏
There are so many views on this topic.
Beautiful post, Don. Looking at your great pictures you wouldn't think that the structure of that bridge would ever change, but it will someday. I don't know when it happened to you or if it has but I can remember turning 50 and thinking about my eventual demise. Just turned 68 and I hardly give it a thought these days. Perspective is a moving target and I love your perspective of just letting it go, holding on to life loosely. Thanks for this, Don.
Thank you so much, Steve! I don’t have a strong memory of when the idea of my own death first hit me as reality. Maybe it hasn’t yet! Or maybe I started practicing mindfulness just in time! (I’m 60).
You said the keyword: mindfulness. So glad that happened to me, too. There’s freedom in being mindful.
Hi Don,
This is not demoralizing or bleak at all! I love the way you incorporate your perspective into everyday happenings. It's really fascinating, actually. I would love to talk more about this with you, because I think about death a lot. Maybe it's because I used to be a grief writer/speaker, and I have heard a lot of stories about death and dying. Maybe it's because it's been acutely on my mind since Sarah's birth and I knew/know that people with her diagnosis can (and do) die out of nowhere, at any age, for any number of reasons.
That said, what fascinates me is that you wrote that your death wouldn't be a big deal for you, only for your wife and those who love you (like us!). Do you ever wonder what nonexistence is like, or have you simply come to terms with knowing you will not know until it happens? I try not to think about how or when I will die, though I do panic from time to time when I consider that my life is already half over (at least)--and that no one really knows when they will die, anyway, so my life might be MORE than half over. I don't like thinking about the possibility of pain or a long, lingering death. But really, I can't control how I will die or when, so I try to just surrender these worries into the ether. All I am given is this moment, anyway, and I don't want to squander it.
Jeannie, sorry this took me two days to reply! As always, I’m super grateful to you for your feedback and thought sharing. I’m looking forward to talking to you on Zoom soon!
Same here, Don! We will have lots to talk about.
…”and the thinking itself tells a story; I am me. Then it grows very attached to that story.”
And wasn’t it said that attachment is what causes all misery? And you even mention and allude to it.
Lots of food for thought here.
Wouldn’t to “just be” as one of those fragments are, would be as the creator—you, me, all of us—experiencing itself in and through all of us—at once—as all of creation. (?)
I don’t know if that made sense.
But I totally get the “HAHAHOHOHEEHEE” at the end! In fact I just heard that song a couple weeks ago. 😂
Thank you, Gail. I do think I understand your question. Are we both fragments of the universe and the whole universe at the same time, and are we the universe's desire to witness itself? Is that close? Of course, we can only speculate about an idea like that. It is a beautiful one! 💚
Yes exactly! Except you put it more succinctly. Thank you!
I AM.
I think you may enjoy listening to NDE stories (near death experiences) although I like to call them actual death experiences. They put time here in this realm into a deeper perspective.
Thank you, Rebecca.
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain
Great quote, thank you, Kert! 💚
It will be like before I was born. Unimaginable, but not alarming. Before my birth, there were people who would know me and waited for the baby who could have been an infinitude of babies but turned out to be me.. A little farther back in time, there were no such people. The opposite process will occur when I die. People will remember and miss me (and maybe resent me) until there are none left.
I like this very much, Rona! 🙏
Hi Don,
I read this yesterday and had to come back and reread it today. Lots in here.
The first thing I thought of was a memory about the bridge collapse over the Mississippi River in MN almost 20 years ago. I had just moved to WI from MN. To this day, I think about that incident every time time I drive across a large bridge. So your opening storyline hit home!
I am not sure I agree about not being able to imagine our own non-existence. I need to think about this more. I feel like I can imagine that.
"Self is something we do, not something we are." More food for thought!
I don't fear death. I've already stood on that threshold thanks to cancer. I've thought about death and written about it, too. Many times. Mostly on my old blog. I posed a question on today's essay asking what your last conversation with yourself might be like. Maybe that's related to your piece in some way.
Thanks for a thought-provoking read. I might be back to read it yet again!
Thank you so much for reading and engaging, Nancy. I really appreciate it!
It’s subtle about imagining one’s own nonexistence. You can do it as long as you project yourself as another self in the scenario (the observer). Without an observer, there would be nothing, no thoughts, no feelings, no self. Not even blackness or emptiness. Just nothing.
This of course is only how I can describe things AS a self.
In actuality, I think the sense of self is just a limited faculty of this body, of consciousness. But I think we, as a piece of the whole universe, actually ARE the universe. Some say we are the universe’s desire to see itself. I would not say that because no one can know WHY we exist, but I do think we are the universe. So when this limited self goes away, what is left is what we always were, before we were born and after.
...I remembered that yesterday was Tuesday. We know what that means. You’ve trained me.:) I was just caught up in my own love troubles yesterday, but here I am...
I loved that part where you said the self is something we do. When I read something like that, I feel it in my body. And I agree, of course.
..then... that idea—that it’s hard or even impossible for us to think about our own disappearance—has also been circling in my mind recently.
...and until then, we’ll keep hanging out a little longer.
That is, at least those two entities we are doing, right?:)
You and me.
Thanks for your support. I would like to take a slow paced walk with you, with pipe, cigar, or something like that😂🥂
I’ll get on a plane to Croatia! 😊
If you do, it will be my pleasure to be your host. No need to worry 🥂
Yep, that’s the thing; acknowledging the “illusion” doesn’t suddenly change the experience.
Thanks for reading, Davor.
I’m here if you need to talk (text, DM, whatever)
Haha, you are absolutely correct, we shared some similarities in our posts yesterday :) I think there is something essential about laughing. There is an element of surrender to it! It's a testament to the human spirit's capacity to find lightness even in the darkest corners of contemplation. It suggests that perhaps true freedom lies not in conquering fear, but in befriending it, even laughing with it, as we journey through the undeniable flow of existence.
Thanks, Alexander.
Hey, I got a question for you. Have you noticed a drop in engagement, even with some of your best essays? (I thought your most recent essay, the one I commented on, was really excellent.) At first I thought maybe I just wasn’t writing as engagingly as I used to, but it seems to be consistent; I’m getting about half as many likes as I used to on my newsletter posts.
Yep! A severe drop in my deliverability (currently 82%, down from 93%), open rate (currently 31%, down from 43%), and engagement (currently 18%, down from 29%). It's killing me! I really thought it was me, but the feedback I've been getting on my June Aliveness series and my July series (thank you for your feedback - I really loved my last essay too) has been exceptional.
Subscribers are down quite a bit too.
I don't feel like your writing has suffered. I have a bad case of ADHD, so I get bored easily :) Your essays are engaging as ever!
I have a suspicion that deliverability is part of the issue.
Oh, well that sounds like something out of anyone’s control. Would an email not reaching its intended inbox mean that the address is bad, or that the recipient has opted out of receiving emails, or some other reason?
It's heavily influenced by both our reputation and the sender email domain's reputation, along with various technical factors. Some issues are things that Substack doesn't allow us to change, which we can modify on other platforms, hence my partial dissatisfaction :).
This is an interesting article if you want to dive into it a bit more: https://blog.beehiiv.com/p/email-deliverability-mastery
Because we all send from a substack domain, we benefit but also get penalized. For newer and smaller substacks (in this case, we are technically "small"), we have an advantage. For larger and more established substacks, you lack the ability to build your own domain reputation. Substacks might have higher open rates and better engagement, which can improve deliverability compared to the average substack. They miss out.
For those with worse metrics, the benefits are tremendous.
Ah, so I think what you're saying is that the receiver's email platform (host?) may actually refuse or spam the email based on conditions such as you mention? Thank you, Alex.
yep! Or hide it, or filter it, or do all sorts of weird things to it. Of course!
Sorry to make you work harder, Alexander, but I actually don’t know what deliverability is 😇
Open rate is the only stat I’ve seen. When I get home, I’ll try to find those other stats.
Thank you so much for this!
Haha! That's okay. It is a simple but important metric. Deliverability refers to the percentage of emails that reach their intended recipients' primary mailboxes. When I send an email to subscribers (as opposed to a post), my deliverability is excellent. However, my regular posts have poor deliverability.
On my other email list on a different platform, I have a much larger list with a deliverability rate of 98%, which is on par with what I'm used to.
I need to sit with this a little while. In the meantime thank you.
Thanks, John!