I've been visiting an old friend — Bassus, whom you may know by reputation — and I want to tell you what I've seen, because it has taught me more than most books.
He is very old now, and his body is failing the way an old ship fails: not one catastrophic breach but many small ones, each patched as it opens, until the patching itself becomes the problem and the hull no longer holds. He knows this. He is watching it happen from the inside, with the particular clarity that comes to people who have stopped pretending.
What strikes me — what I go back to see, honestly, because I need to see it again — is that his mind is more alive than ever. Not despite what's happening but almost because of it. The closer he comes to the end, the more settled he seems, the way a charioteer runs the seventh lap of a race better than the first because everything that was going to happen has already happened and what remains is only to finish.
He talks about death freely, and I want to pass on what he says, because it carries different weight coming from someone who is watching it approach than it would coming from me, at a safe distance, theorizing.
He says: if there is discomfort in dying, that is the fault of the dying person, not of death itself. The moment of death is no more painful than the moment after it. And to fear what you won't be present to feel is as irrational as fearing what will never happen to you — which is to say, it's pure waste.
He says: he hoped there would be no pain at the last moment, but if there is, it will be brief. No great pain lasts long. And an old man's soul sits already on his lips; only a little force is needed to release it. A fire fed by good wood needs water to quench it. A fire with nothing left to burn goes out on its own.
Those who tell us best what death brings are the ones who have stood in its path and welcomed it.
I've watched him now across many visits, and what I was waiting to see — whether his steadiness would hold as the end came closer — I can report: it increased. He grows calmer as it approaches. Not resigned, not numb — calm. The calm of a person whose judgment is fixed and who has nothing left to revise.
What he keeps returning to is this: we don't fear death itself. We fear the thought of death. Death is always equally distant from us — which means if it deserves fear, it deserves constant fear, which is clearly no way to live. Better to think on it regularly until the thought loses its terror, until you can hold the fact of your own mortality the way you hold any other fact — true, acknowledged, and not in charge of your hours.
The man who has never wished to die, says Bassus, never truly wished to live. Life is granted with the reservation that it ends. To resist the end is to resist the terms of the gift.
I keep going back to see him, and I'll keep going. I'm learning something there that can't be learned from books. The person who has sat with death as a neighbor and has not flinched — that person's words carry a different weight. I want to be the kind of person who can speak that way when my time comes.
Think on death often, so that when it arrives you won't need to think. You'll already know.
Yours, learning from the edge,