Everyman, I am Death

Today I am reminded of a quotation from Roger Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead:

Nick swore he’d die with his boots on, on some exotic safari, but he found his Kilimanjaro in a hospital on Earth, where they’d cured everything that was bothering him, except for the galloping pneumonia he’d picked up in the hospital.

That had been, roughly, two hundred and fifty years ago. I’d been a pallbearer.

I found out in an email this morning, that my pet turtle, who had been in the care of someone back home in the US had died. He had suffered a fall, and died. That was it. One minute he was alive, then he fell, and he died just like that.

It’s not the first time I’ve lost a pet, as our dog Napoleon died a long and painful death shortly after Baby was born, when I had to put him to sleep. However, Napoleon had been adopted late in life, so we knew he was old and not in the best of care. We only had him less than three years. The turtle by contrast, had been a part of my life since I was 10, and 21 years have passed since. For a turtle in captivity he had lived long and almost never got sick, since I never kept water in his tank that could get polluted. Instead, I always bathed him in a kitty litter box, as instructed at the pet store. To be honest, I was not a very good owner. A turtle or any reptile is really not meant for captivity, and require a lot more work and experience than most people realize, and at the age of 10, I was only given a couple minutes of instruction and that was it. His diet wasn’t right, and his tank was not humid enough for his species, the three-toed box turtle, nor did I regularly trim his nails and beak. However, I still loved him a lot, and was stunned to hear of his death, especially since I couldn’t be there, and hadn’t seen him in over a year.

It’s a sobering reminder that death doesn’t wait for an convenient time or dramatic moment. Life can get snuffed out in very mundane, inconvenient and ignoble ways. Indeed, as I talked about in the past, it simply takes the right causes and conditions to come together at the right time, that’s it. The core teaching in Buddhism about the self, the five aggregates, emphasizes this point as the five aggregates are all subject to change and flux, and have no inherent nature.¹ Their existence is contingent upon other factors, which once removed, deprive them of their own continuation. The composite nature of one’s self breaks up and that’s that.

As such, we should reflect that all things in this life are tenuous and should not be treated with illusions of permanency. We act shocked when something passes, yet the belief in permanency exists solely in our minds. We want things to stay a certain way for as long as we live, but under our feet, sands shift and existence unfolds in unexpected directions. The divergence between what we expect and what unfolds is when we get upset, weep and complain. Existence unfolds exactly as it does due to a very tangled web of causes and conditions, all quite cold and logical, only our minds fail to grasp this, and instead we construct a different reality out of our limited view from the moment of birth onward. The gap in between is where problems arise.

Thus it is that the Buddha is revered in times past as the “physician” who cures the ills of the world with his teachings, the Dharma, being the medicine.

Namo Shakyamuni Buddha

P.S. Title is loosely based off the medieval “Everyman” plays. This is off-schedule, but something I felt like writing now. Just got back from a nice weekend trip in the UK, so apologies for not responding to people sooner.

P.P.S. I want to reiterate that non-domesticated pets are a real challenge, and best left to professionals. Too many die abused and neglected after their owners lose interest, or like me, don’t know what they’re doing in the first place, and more pet stores should do a better job informing people about the challenges and proper care of such pets before allowing a purchase.

¹ In Buddhist parlance, they are said to exist, but have and “empty” nature.