still dead

All day I've been thinking about Luna, my mother-in-law's dalmation that I helped to put down yesterday (see blog below).

It just strikes me how permanent death is. How permanent is that decision to say now is the time. Now is when we're actually going to put the animal in the car and drive to the vet. The moment when the vet slid the needle into her vein a part of me cried out "Not yet!" even as I knew that it was the right thing to do, and another time would only be later, not better, and actually as concerns the animal's comfort, worse.

So much of our life experiences we get to undo, or redo. We get to try and fail, and try again, make mistakes, be forgiven, suceed eventually perhaps, or try a different way. And then death puts a stop to all that. The bracket of birth is closed by the bracket of death and forever after our life is only what happened in between. None of what happened in life is eliminated by death, but there are no more new experiences added to the collection. For all its highs and lows, triumphs and failures, it is what it is, forever now, just that. Whether it ends with a bang or a whimper, it ends.

My personal sense, confirmed by the vet, is that Luna's bracket of life probably would have closed within another month or two anyway, and whatever experiences were left possible for her would not have been joyful. That's precisely the circumstances that justify euthanasia.

Lent invites contemplations of this sort. Today is day 15. And it also invites contemplation of whether that bracket at the end is really as impenetrable as it looks. Is it only because living creatures can't imagine not being alive that we believe in continued life? Or could our experience of endless undoing include even undoing death?