The Order of Endings

From time to time, I like to go sit in the graveyard. It’s peaceful there, quiet but for the snap of flags and the tapping of winter bare branches, the sounds of traffic made fainter by the expanse of yard dotted with marble and concrete. It is a reminder that all things have a cycle, and all cycles have endings.

It occurred to me today that the mind often identifies death with disorder and chaos, and the ego identifies it with total destruction and horror. Neither are prepared to accept death as a transition, as something with its own order which leads to somewhere else.

The wind was chill, like fingers stealing in my open car window, ruffling my hair. Death is cold, but cold is merely a state of heat—a few days ago in the kitchen I heard our new housemate joking about being on team entropy, to which I responded, “aren’t we all?”

Death is a part of life and living, where things assume their last order from life, the pieces falling where they may and resting. It’s why we tell people to be very careful taking the advice of the dead. Whatever state you lived in, you died in, and you keep, unless you choose to elevate.

Death is the order of endings, the order which you earned in living. Whatever you’ve done follows you into the realms of death.

Elevation would be worth it, if it only changed the order to which you fall. Fortunately, elevation does a lot more than that.