With Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington’s rapid, successive passing, I’ve been thinking about death a lot. Or rather, it’s been a frequent visitor that comes knocking at my mind-house. It’s been making me think. What it would take for someone to end their own life. Especially also when they have young dependents.
Their news hit me hard. For a moment I thought I was over it, but Chester came in my dream last night. He was “alive” in the dream, but it soon became a nightmare. I don’t remember specifics of the nightmare, but I woke up, and felt shitty for the rest of the day. Like a dark cloud over my head. I ache. Still won’t leave my mind at 2am.
This year, thoughts of Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse have also frequently entered my head.
They were all such deep-feeling artists. Vulnerable. Sensitive. Raw. The perfect vessels to channel the most profound, enigmatic, inexplicable secrets of the cosmos… If the cosmos ever wanted to tell us anything.
I’ve recently read Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s new book, and reading Stephen Hawking’s update to A Brief History of Time.
All this has had me wondering, if death of the flesh really means the end. I know there are religious explanations, etc. But while religious faith has its emotional and psychological benefits for some (and I respect the prerogatives of those who hold those beliefs), those inscriptions are just not fact when dealing with objective reality. Fact is not a matter of opinion, despite politics.
Fact is, we don’t know most of everything. Everything we know consists of less than 5% of what makes up the universe. While we know their effects and some other crumbs of information, we still don’t know exactly what dark matter is, which composes 27% of our universe, or exactly what dark energy is, which is 68% of our universe. As of today, 95% of the universe is a mystery.
Now comes the part where I (sort of) contradict myself. What if, even though misguided, there is such a thing as after-life? Not some heaven or hell with a bearded man in a white robe or a red dude with horns, but just a different state of being? Like states of matter: liquid, solid, gas, plasma. What if there are parts of us that are made of dark matter? What if it can retain consciousness (whatever that is)? Or what if somehow, when we “die”, we transform and gain entry to a dimension or world where we’re made of antiparticles, a world where electrons and positrons flip roles?
Is death all that bad? The universe is part of us, we are part of it. We are made of stardust. Maybe those artists - the greatest of their generation, subconsciously know something inexplicable but profound. Maybe there’s more to what we’ve known life to be. Maybe they’re exploring it for us.
If there’s anything we know so far, is that there are no backtracks. It’s a one-way trip.
Yet,
Sometimes I’m curious. Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes it tempts me.
Sometimes I muse.
But also, I love my family. And I look forward to Star Wars 8, and 9. And Justice League and Wonder Woman 2. And Infinity War.
And the next Pixar emotion feast that makes me 7 years old again.
Or a grilled cheese I can’t and won’t have now because it’s 2am.
There are still things left here, I suppose.
I’d like more socks.
Good night.