Celebrate your reality: confronting life and death

It is an inherent quality of our existence. With life must come death; we know this and perhaps learn it in our earliest stages of consciousness. But for college students, on campuses where youth is ripe with possibility and healthy bodies glisten and laugh in the sun, the reality of death is particularly unsettling. Among the ambitious, gym-obsessed, Descartes-devotees of Yale, death is usually the furthest thought from our minds. But two powerful tragedies this semester have awakened our campus’ sensitivity to mortality, illuminating that, ultimately, in practice and scholarship, our conceptions of life determine our notions of death.               

Our intellectual lives revolve around the pursuit of universal truth. In our studies, we chase an encounter with a system of knowledge beyond ourselves, whether through art, mathematics, or scientific analysis. Within these disciplines, however, lies a vital body of knowledge that cannot be studied on paper, only experienced through the eyes of the human mind.  In his essay, “On the Purpose of Liberal Arts Education,” Robert Harris expounds the benefits of a tertiary educational experience. College aims to accomplish three mammoth ideals: to develop the mind so the world may become understandable; to develop a telescope to the wealth of human knowledge; and, to produce, through interaction and interpersonal growth, a socio-intellectual map of mankind and his place in the universe. At a magical place like Yale, these three crossroads take form not just in Kagan classes and late-night paper writing, but in Master’s Teas, dining hall conversations, student jobs, and yes, even death.

Though there is no midterm for the death of a friend or classmate, when it arrives clangorously, we are reminded of the fragility of our own lives. Perhaps, because of American campus culture and the cultural icons, movies, and TV series that indulge in this stereotype, college life has been painted with the faces of Frisbee-flinging coeds, sunning on the sprawl of quads, their young backs unscarred, and a beer nearby. This portrait is false, much more a cultural imposition than a realistic understanding of the crucial emotional germination that occurs in four adolescent years.

Yes, college is a happy symbol of celebration. But it is also a place of much sadness, where self-discovery involves a dangerous confrontation with the face in the mirror and the past that took you there. Truth is: We all experience a certain propensity for sorrow. This week alone, I have dealt with the death of a well-loved aunt in a country thousands of miles away, midterms, and the regular anxiety about employment.

But as young adults, we do something strange. We internalize what we perceive as an external standard of fearlessness and inundation, pushing the experiences we fear into an even more volatile realm of denial. When an individual within our own social group exposes us to this dangerous truth—that none of us, not even the best of our young minds with our brisk bodies, are immune to tragedy—we risk going senseless. Gothic walls were meant to keep out loneliness, heartache, and loss. Or were they?  If you find yourself hiding from the emotions you are meant to confront, or if you are at all troubled with the attempt of fitting grief into your Yale experience, I offer my own methods to recuperation.

Acknowledge the experience. People die, but the art of dying is the art of living. Though no living thing is impervious to death, we can find solace in understanding that this too is a quality of life. To live we must die, even if our stories seem half-filled in, and the colors were barely splashed on the page. The infinite lives we lead, and the stories we weave in that brief moment of time defeats the notion that there will ever be a single end to such a powerful life force. “We die,” writes Sherwin Nuland, “so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions upon trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died—in a sense, for us.”

Inherit death, fearlessly. Yes, we’re young, but I’ve watched a pale look creep onto the faces of too many of my friends as they contemplate how quickly it might all end. I won’t lie: It’s downright unhappy to contemplate such a thought, but to avoid it in the hope of altogether escaping mortality is a childish lie. When a human being dies, it is the end of our shared physical reality with them. We may never physically share new experiences with them or see them laugh beyond the confines of our dreams, but consider that this loss is still no more of a by-product than the very laws of nature that made an individual constitute our lives in the first place. To inherit death is to claim a fearless legacy of life from beginning to end.

Celebrate your reality. Trees, flowers, soft soil after autumn rain, ringing bells climbing above the atmosphere, all lay bare on the canvas of New Haven life. Everyday, we wake up to a chance meeting with the very system of life that has guided our forefathers, friends, and relatives. If through education, we seek some understanding of this model, its principles to which we are eternally subject, we must find peace with whatever time we are given. As beings on the cusp of youth, we must chase after what intrigues us—people, poetry, the constancy of gravity.

Yet we must also remain happily realistic with regard to what we know so we may exist infinitely within those spaces. It is only when we reach this resolve that we can truly live that most blissful youthful dream: to wake every day to sing, “But for now, we are young, let us lay in the sun, and count every beautiful thing we see.”

Godspeed.

Raj Persaud is a senior is Berkeley.

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