On Death & Dying
The Turning Feral Journal - Day 48
Day 48 - My dad was right… my liberal arts degree was pretty much useless. Money spent on classes I don’t remember and years spent with teachers who left little to no impression on me. However, in reflecting on the academic experience of college there was one class that stuck out. It was a class titled “On Death & Dying.”
Yup – you read that right. On my journey toward a political science degree I had to take a slew of odd elective courses, of which this is the only one I remember well. In the course “On Death & Dying” we covered a semester's worth of study on what it’s like to die. We read a plethora of books on cultural differences in caring for the dead, what different regions of the world believe happens after you die, stories of near death experiences, and we capped the semester off by walking around cemeteries in Charleston, SC to read hundreds of years worth of epitaphs… ya know, the cheeky little sayings that get left on your headstone when you pass?
And out of nearly four years of ‘education’ that one exercise of walking around cemeteries to prepare to write our own epitaph was the most profound part of my undergraduate career. It’s not that I had a fear of death, but taking time to read hundreds of peoples lives summed up in a few words gave me a new perspective on how to live my life. It made me realize that no matter how much we squeeze into our lives and pile onto our resumes, the future generations will only know us by what’s left on our headstone.
Even going back hundreds of years, the most impressionable headstones I could find read like “Here lies X, a dedicated father and husband,” or, “Here lies Y, a wife, mother, and philanthropist.” Very few headstones recorded someone’s profession and the economy of space made it difficult to add fluff or useless info. When it came to writing our own it was difficult to choose just a few adjectives to describe everything I had hoped to accomplish. And since it’s been nearly fifteen years since I took this course I wanted to renew the exercise by rewriting my headstone’s inscription. If I were to die today, here is what I would want my epitaph to read:
Here lies Zach Hanson, a husband, father, and adventurer.
A man who always wanted to see over one more ridge.
01/12/1989 - [death]
Daily Prompt: What would your epitaph read if you died today? Take some time to meditate on this and write it down here:
Motivational Passage:
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
-Mark Twain
Rewilding Action: Tools. If you want to get anything done around your home or with your hobbies, you need tools. And unfortunately, you need to be a bit brand agnostic here… most power tools are built around their batteries and they are not universal across brands. I for one got sucked into the Ryobi family early, which is cause for being made fun of by people with “real” handyman skills. But, all of the major players are great these days… Milwaukee, Dewault, Makita, etc. My advice would be to pick one and make sure you at least have a drill and battery to start off with… you can then build out your arsenal as you need it for projects that you take on in the future.