Extinction is the human distinction. What other creature wakes howling though nothing’s amiss?

                  Just now I woke blue as a blueberry. Henry, hearing me rustling, rustled too, happy as a proverbial clam. (Why clams are happy is a smiler I won’t spoil.) I was distraught, quivering at the verge of ridiculous rage – from an imaginary injury! I was not dying. My health’s pretty good for 75. But I would die, sure as shootin’ (a cliché from another corner of the continent). How sad was that!!

                  This is no pity party I’m throwing. No sympathy please, I despise my grievance. Henry dreads no such outcome – and never will. Dogs know what death is – they can smell it – they’ll face it when they must – but to let it spoil their morning? How stupid can you be!

                  Death is the human engine. To exist takes scant effort, as Thoreau observed. A few days’ work will pay for a year if you live small. But humans want more than to exist. We want to shine, signify. Why? So our glow, our significance, will defeat the dark – for a moment. Death is driving my pen. That these words will be read tomorrow, dandy. That they might be read when I’m dust, sweet!               

                  I wouldn’t mind death if it didn’t hurt so much. Not the fact of it – they can blot the pain when my hour comes – but the prospect. A world without me? Me without my world? I won’t be conscious, you say – that’s true, I suppose – only oblivion is unimaginable. I will be stuck – for eternity – with my pathetic result. Howl!

                  John Donne made short work of death in his famous sonnet:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Donne damns death as an impotent wuss, contemptible paid hand, door-opener to delicious eternity – wipe that smirk off your face, Death, you’re nothing! Only the fact of the poem contradicts its claim: this is the taunt of a child at a fearsome foe: “naa, naa, you can’t hurt me” means its opposite.

                  I insist I’m unafraid of death – you too, probably – that we’ve made our peace with it – here today, gone tomorrow, and so forth. Reason takes pride in its marksmanship.

                  Yet for all our arguments, rhetoric, bravado, death still stands, unfazed, undiminished. Dr. Donne fails, I fail, we all fail to shrink death to negligible. The idea of death will always be our biggest deal, the source of our force. The more we fear death, the faster we flee it. Henry, having breakfasted, favors a further snooze. I’m here gibbering, defying death with diction.

                  Fantasy alone defangs death. What a blessing to believe in eternal life! Only eternity’s absurd, a magician’s trick, a rabbit out of an empty hat. Nothing lasts forever, perhaps not even time.

                  I disable death by dancing with it. I am not a good dancer. But as long as we’re dancing, I am not dead.