Life and Death
_____I’m alive. I know that. We all know that we are alive. I am encased in a body, as we all are, that is about three and a half months older than I am. Not too many people know that.
_____For the first trimester, the embryo in the mother’s womb is not yet alive. The moment we enter the womb is the beginning of the second trimester. (A trimester is three and one half months but, because the infant head would be too large to express at the end of the third trimester the child is delivered a month and a half early, which extends the third by one month so the child becomes aware that it exists two and a half months after expression from the womb, effectively making the “moment of birth” that moment when the child realizes it is crying.)
_____During the first trimester we are not there. We enter suddenly at what used to be called the moment of quickening, (before the medical fraternity said it was the moment of first movement, which is actually the end of the second trimester,) and go about the business of finding out who we are. For the next three and a half months we think and study non-stop, going through ancestral memory.
_____But enough of all that. This is a short essay on life and death, not on the structure of human beings. The point is that we entered these bodies when they had been under construction for three and a half months, and so, when this construction fails we will leave.
_____We will leave. It’s impossible to find out where we go, just as it’s impossible to tell where we came from, but we leave this body when it fails, when it ceases to function, to we know not what.
_____The moment we enter these bodies we are fully aware that we have arrived. I expect that I will be fully aware that I am leaving, as will anyone else that is fully aware. (There I go again, getting into the structure of human beings again. Ooh well. If one were properly structured one would be fully aware.)
_____So life begins when we enter the womb at the moment of the second trimester and life ends when we leave on the failure of the vessel, but we simply come and go. In some sense death doesn’t exist.
_____It’s funny that we feel as though we have eternal life physically and die intellectually when it’s the other way ‘round. That feeling of invincibility may well stem from the innate knowledge that we came here and so of course we’ll just leave.
_____Where do we go? The Buddhists, I think, believe we go to another life, reincarnate as something else, a bird, a fish, another animal, a tree maybe. I like that but I don’t know.
_____The Biblicists think we’ll go to a heaven if we obey laws put down by other humans. I don’t like that, especially since almost all joy of existence is outlawed, but I don’t know. No one knows. The most we can know is that we leave.