Letters to my son - kent nerburn

Once many years ago i was present at a total eclipse of the sun. I had climbed to the top of the high hill and had sat down to wait. It was early morning, slightly past sunup. Birds were singing in the trees around me. Far below on a hillside cows were grazing and horses rustled in the tall grasses.

When the moment came, the sun began to darken. The horses were silent, the cows stood still. The birds ceased their chirping. As the sun disappeared behind the moon, the earth became still. The cows sank to their knees and the birds placed their heads beneath their wings.

Only the ghostly corona of the hidden sun remained to cast a fragile light on the enveloping darkness. There was no wind. There was no sound. The light of the sun had been taken away from us and the world was cast into a great darkness.

At that moment something momentous happened: I no longer feared death. I felt annihiltion, but annihilation into a oneness. I thought of my uncle who at that moment lay dying thousands of miles away. I thought of his fear and his loneliness and wished for all the world that he could have been with me for those seconds when the sun gave up its light.

I can't put a name to the knowledge I gained. It was too far beyond the human for me to understand. But I know it had to do with death, and I know it had to do with the great darkness into which we must all go.

There was a peace there, a peace that surpasses all understanding.

When fears of death ovewhelm me, as they do at moments of sickness or great danger, I think of that hilltop and the birds with their heads tucked beneath their wings. All of us - me, the birds, the cows, and the horses - had been taken up into something larger than life itself.

Our selves had been obliterated; our individuality taken from us. Yet there was no impulse to scream against that obliteration. We were subsumed into something so great that we accepted it like the tranquil embrace of a long-sought sleep.

If that moment on the hillside contained truth - and I think it did - we do death no justice by measuring it against ourselves. We are too small; it is too great. What we fear is only the loss of the self, and the self knows eternity like a shadow knows the sun.

So, fear dying if you must. It takes from us the only life we can understand, but that is a worthy loss to mourn. But do not fear death. It is something too great to celebrate, too great to fear. Either it brings us to a judgement, so it is ours to control by the kind of life we live, or it annihilates us into the great rhythm of nature, and we join the eternal peace of the revolving heavens.

In either case, I believe in my heart that it is ours to trust.

In the brief moment when I stood on that hillside while the earth's light went out, I felt no indifference and no sense of loss. Instead I felt an unutterable sense of gain, a shattering of all my own boundaries into a vast sense of peace.

If that was a moment of death, death should hold no terror, and we should embrace our dying as a momentary passage into the great harmony of eternity. Perhaps we cannot hear that harmony now. Perhaps we even hear it as a vast and empty silence. But we should not be deceived. That vastness is not empty, it is a presence. Even in the greatest places silence has a sound.

--------------------------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------

we only saw the flight-paths of birds that day. no eclipse was in sight. beside us were fellow companions and a book of poems. still, the same silence visited us that evening and left a vanished trail on our lives, the little that remained of the two years spent in college, the many hopes we carry within and the uninviting futures which lay ahead.

-unwritten notes on a final stop-
ap field trip to chua chu kang lawn cemetery class of 2004 / 2005-