Trick of Light - August, 7pm

At a certain time in a certain month, the light of the setting sun reflects off the pine tree outside my home in such a way that some patches of needles look as if they’ve yellowed. It disorients me when I look at the tree because for a moment, I wonder if the tree is dying. 

It doesn’t make sense, of course, that such a tall, healthy-looking, and dense tree could cross from life to death in a matter of an afternoon and show the symptoms of its illness through small, unnaturally well-delineated patches of yellowing needles. But is it nonsensical really, that a living being can cross from life to death so quickly? Is the road that divides the living and the dying all that wide?

We watch the news and know intellectually that it is not. People are murdered, buried under rubbles created by bombs, dead in a bus accident, swept away in a flood. These stories sound like stories far away of people living in different worlds, a world where life and death are the flip sides of the same coin. Life and death—one doesn’t exist without the other. So we must be grateful, people say. We must guard life.

But living and dying? As close as life and death seem, the process of living and that of dying seem so far to the point of being incompatible. It’s incomprehensible to think of the body wasting away when it has been and continues to believe that it is still in the thick of life. Such much life has been lived; one looks back and the past is full of events. It goes on and on. There is much life to be lived: hopes and dreams we’ve put in front of our eyes and energy, money, and resources that we’ve saved up to live in the future.

Sudden, complete death we can understand. We will not know what has hit us. Yet the possibility of such sudden termination of our consciousness seems improbable. But the awareness that we are slowly dying and will meet death inevitably in the near future, the fact that our trajectory that was up and outward is coming inward, rotting into ourselves, leaves us with our mouths open in incomprehension and heads shaking in disbelief. 

Living and dying are cousins of life and death. Just once removed—they are slow processes, the ones that we engage in or are forced to engage in rather than a mere state of being or something that happens to us. It is not a surprise then that the tree could flourish and then start to yellow and wither, that we could switch over to a path of decline at little or no notice. There is no point in being on guard. It will take us by surprise and disorient us. But at least we will have some sunsets that we now won’t take for granted and time to prepare.