Sunspots (https://sunspots.cornellsun.com/tag/death/)
Anyone who has binge-watched Modern Family, Full House, or any other family based sit-com can admit to laughing loudly at situations, while simultaneously smirking and thinking “this would never actually happen…”
I’ll admit, I once believed this too. The events in those shows seem too scripted to ever actually happen. The timing too perfect. The misunderstandings too construed. The setbacks too unlucky.
“ᛏ Týr er einhendr áss
ok ulfs leifar
ok hofa hilmir
Mars tiggi.”
Time does not, and has never, suffered itself to be stopped on the whim of a mortal. If all mystified fatalism, be it twine-snipping hags at the base of the world-tree and the general stuff of soothsayers, has been stripped from our cold-fact cosmology, this central fact has never been, and almost certainly never shall, be doubted. The date of a man’s birth and of his death may be preordained or may hang entirely on Zufall, stupidity, and other waste-products of the human psyche, but its circumstances cannot be altered in fact. “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; /
Petals on a wet black bough.” -Ezra Pound
Shortly after I was born, I, a rosy-faced eructation on Planet Earth, received the mixed blessing of being initiated into a certain Bohemian brand of Protestantism, whose believers, given the demonym “Moravians” after their hilled Czech homeland, practiced burial rites which, even in my ur-youth, I found unusual. The various other cemeteries of colonial Pennsylvania ranged from the solemn to the gaudy, painted, weeping Madonnas and glum little cherubs shaking their heads.