Traveling Death

 

Traveling Death

            I told him, “I feel dead.” But, that wasn’t true, it was just small talk. I don’t feel dead, and I am not sure you can feel dead. Numb: yes, I have been there. Detached, removed: that too, and too often. Not dead. Not like I want to be dead either. That would be easy enough to make good on.

            It is like everything around me is dead; that was the feeling. I felt like everything was dead. That, however, is the biggest lie of them all. At this point, even the dead are not dead. It is the lie they got us all to start believing. Or, it wasn’t that everything was dead, it was that everything was dying. Or, that it was broken and on its way to death. Those, though, were just on ramps to the ‘everything is dying’ lie.

            As I sit here, waiting to get on the airplane, I am not dead. Nothing around me is dead: not even the leather of my shoes is dead; not the jet fuel being pumped into the planes outside. The cow isn’t dead; the dinosaurs are not dead; the people who died in the last months since I was last on a plane—or planning to get on a plane—are not dead. None of these are dead. They are all still acting in our lives. All of these things, and more, are thrown in front of us constantly: or thrown at us when we don’t heed the fear they are supposed to inspire. Constantly as dead, but that in itself keeps them alive. In a perverse way as well: still alive. We are beaten into thinking of them as dead. It helps makes us feel as if we are dead as well, or that we are on the verge of dying. We are at least broken, and because of that dying, in this dead and dying world.

            We are numb. Overloaded with death, with fear of death. We are tricked into identifying with the dead. If we are not numb, we are filled with anxiety. A near constant panic, a paranoia, grips us. We are shown that it is all not OK. We are shown that we need to fear. That it is not OK and we need to fear the absence of OK because it is akin to death. Because so much is dead, or dying, we could be dying too and not even know it. We could kill others out of our ignorance and carelessness. Our unawareness of our own situation; our own dying. If it isn’t fear and panic (if we deny the deadness and dying all around us), it is anxiety manifested as detachment. (And detachment can become that worst sin of carelessness.) We are not dead, but we are detached from everything, and so it feels dead to us. Even if it is chaos and panic, it feels dead. And, if we accept that it is all dead, then we must be dead too. Or we should want to be dead. Empathy. It is the highest of the virtues.

            Yet, we cannot want to be dead. Not consciously. We cannot admit that. And we cannot allow for others to die. When they die, we do too because it could have been us instead. No reason, logic or tracing. Everything is dead or dying, that we must accept. But we cannot accept death; we must defy it. We must defy ourselves to defy death, even the chance of it. Why? How? To not die, not ever. To defy death even though it scares us to death to do so. Or so it should.

            Of course, none of the people around me here at the gate are dead. And we are not dying. We have all been tested. Still, in the back of our minds it is kept alive that like that cat in the box: we could be both alive and dead.

We are dead serious, at least. No one looks excited or happy to be traveling. We don’t want to travel, or we can’t admit that we want to. It is necessary; we have to travel. It is a burden, a chore, a responsibility. It must be such; no one would put so many lives in danger if it wasn’t a necessity. The taxi driver, the check-in clerk, the security screeners, the pilots and crew… None of them chose to be exposed to this deadly pathogen that is always all around us. No, not just in our minds. No, they have to be here so you had better not take this lightly. You had better have to be here too. Otherwise: it isn’t responsible, reasonable, moral, just.

So we travel with this sense of responsibility: a moral duty and sense of justice to prevent death. We travel in jeopardy: not our own, but in an environment of jeopardy created by us. A responsibility to justice to avoid death. Death is all around us… or so they want us to believe. We must believe that we bring death with us—like we are trafficking drugs or weapons. We might suddenly inject anyone around us with a fatal hit. We might let the pin out of a grenade at any moment, and not know to throw, run, hide or fall on it.

We are all masked, but executioners were masked too. How can we be sure that none of the eyes around us are not looking to kill someone? And their faces are covered only so they can do so without getting caught.

I try to brush off the paranoia. I try to ditch the fear, or at least check it all at the gate. I try to put the death out of mind because even those that have died are not really endlessly dead. Not as long as we remember them. As long as we remember them and move on with purpose, with meaning. They may be dead, but they are would want us to live. That keep them alive somehow, as long as we keep living.

I get on the plane, finally. I get on to go to something that I should have attended to months ago, but I couldn’t because the planes stopped. That didn’t stop though, and it needs to be done in person. Or it needed to. Now, those plans and possibilities could be dead. Still, I won’t know until I go there, in person. Alive and in person.

I am not dead; none of us are dead. Though fear and guilt may make us numb: numb is not dead. Anxiety is not insanity, unless we give in to it. And even insanity is not death.