It's Not the View it's the Voyage

On my final day in Athens, I decided there was one last landmark I was just a little curious about, and having nothing better to do (except relax), I decided to go for a hike up to the top of Lycebettus Hill. Here's the thing, Lycebettus Hill happens to be the highest point within the actual city of Athens, and this is no sloping green pasture. It juts up like an edifice in the dead center of the Athenian valley. It's steep, so steep in fact that in the middle of Athens, it's hillsides are almost completely undeveloped. There's a winding road, a few trails, and a vertical tram up to the top. I, of course, elected to walk.

Along the way, I had my MP3 player with me (thanks for the tip Walker, you rock). I went through the Dracula song several times (I swear, if I only learn to play 2 songs on piano, it must be one of them), and then on to some other tunes. I'm hiking, I'm sweating, and eventually I'm listening to Sufjan Stevens. Now I don't know what it is about me and music, but I have always been a sucker for emotional songs. Not lame whiney emo, but songs that sound authentic, simple, and heartbreaking. A good example is, "If you get there before I do," a country song ( I had a phase) about a recurring note left between a couple in love from the time they were children until they were both old, and one finally passed away. Give it a listen. If you cry, you're on my wavelength. If not, you may not get all that's about to come out in this blog.

So I'm doing good, LCD Sound System has my spirits up and my feet moving. Sufjan's Illinoise album is getting geared, and I'm loving it when "Casimir Pulaski Day" comes on. For those of you who don't Wiki every detail of your life, this song is dedicated to Sufjan's childhood love, who died of cancer on May 1, the day on which the state of Illinois celebrates Kazsmir Pulaski, a polish noble who helped fight with America in the War of Independence.

So anyway, it's a sad song about youth, innocence, and dealing with the permanence and inescapability of death. Now death has never been something I've dealt with well. Truth be told, it scares the crap out of me, and for me, personally, that fear is not tied to religion. When I was younger and more devout, death scared me just as much as it does now when I've fewer ties to the prospect of an afterlife.

Hiking up the mount and listening to the song a few times, I allowed myself to consider more thoroughly not just the eventuality of my death, but of my loved ones, specifically my mother. Even thinking about it now, I'm tearing up, and I was likewise on the trail. But since no one else was around, and the whole point of thinking is to get at something substantial, I kept delving into the issue as the lump in my throat traveled to my eyes.

And here's where religion enters into the picture. My mother, who has been both rewarded and tormented by her decision to raise three boys, is a truly beautiful person. She's great and i love her, but who can't say the same (or at least, who would say otherwise on a public blog that their mother was likely to read)? Mom has gone through several interesting transformations since we came around, and her religious re-awakening I have always found to be both staggeringly brave and honest, while at the same time my personal explorations have taken me in an opposite direction.

So onto the issue of death.

I'm so lucky, I've had to deal with very little death among family and friends. I've seen two great-great-grandmothers pass, a few dear pets, two friends from my youth, and recently my very wise grandfather. Most of those were at the right time to go, nothing sudden or unnatural.

But eventually, my mother (here also used as a stand-in for all the people I care about) will die. And when she does, I'm likely going to be around for it, and I have no idea how to deal with this guaranteed eventuality: she believes that she will be going on to a better place. I don't mean that she feels righteously assured of her place in heaven, she's too ridiculously humble for that, but I mean that she does believe in life after death, while I can't really find much rationale for it. In other words, in this hypothetical, I would want to comfort my mother, but I worry that just repeating what I know she believes isn't being honest with my understanding of the world, but the deathbed is hardly the place for a debate.

So how do we rectify it? If we both believe there is no afterlife, we should be sad that she'll be gone forever. If we believe there is an afterlife, we can be sad that she won't be with us anymore, but in at least some way we can celebrate her transition to the next level. But if we're split, how can we handle our own reaction while supporting the other person at the same time?

The conclusion I came to (before I decided the mountain wasn't going to climb itself, and this conversation was now substantially contributing to my dehydration), was no real epiphany at all. We all face death alone, and despite the numerous return-from-the-brink descriptions, we really don't know what happens, and we never will. This is one thing no amount of Scientific research or probes are going to solve. I like to wait in the hopes of a discovery to help me inform my opinion, but in this case humanity has been waiting for 5000 years for an answer. It's gotten several theories, but no definitive answer.

what I resolved was that the important thing is obviously to be there for each other in such a situation, and that our difference of opinion really wouldn't matter. My mom could believe whatever she wanted, and it wouldn't change or hurt anything, and while I don't think such an experience would convert me into suddenly believing in an afterlife, it might just be the first event that could make me hope that all my rationalism and logic was wrong.

And that's the thoughts going through my head with a quiet love ballad in my ears and the entire city of Athens sprawling out before my eyes.

Weber (on the lamb)