“Neither is it a recipe for one disease only; death is the infallible cure of all; ’tis a most assured port that is never to be feared, and very often to be sought. It comes all to one, whether a man give himself his end, or stays to receive it by some other means; whether he pays before his day, or stay till his day of payment come; from whencesoever it comes, it is still his; in what part soever the thread breaks, there’s the end of the clue. The most voluntary death is the finest.”

“Living is slavery if the liberty of dying be wanting. The ordinary method of cure is carried on at the expense of life; they torment us with caustics, incisions, and amputations of limbs; they interdict aliment and exhaust our blood; one step farther and we are cured indeed and effectually. Why is not the jugular vein as much at our disposal as the median vein? For a desperate disease a desperate cure.”

“But this does not pass without admitting a dispute: for many are of opinion that we cannot quit this garrison of the world without the express command of Him who has placed us in it; and that it appertains to God who has placed us here, not for ourselves only but for His Glory and the service of others, to dismiss us when it shall best please Him, and not for us to depart without His licence: that we are not born for ourselves only, but for our country also, the laws of which require an account from us upon the score of their own interest, and have an action of manslaughter good against us; and if these fail to take cognisance of the fact, we are punished in the other world as deserters of our duty.”

“Death to that degree so frightens some men, that causing them to hate both life and light, they kill themselves, miserably forgetting that this same fear is the fountain of their cares.”

“And the opinion that makes so little of life, is ridiculous; for it is our being, ’tis all we have. Things of a nobler and more elevated being may, indeed, reproach ours; but it is against nature for us to contemn and make little account of ourselves; ’tis a disease particular to man, and not discerned in any other creatures, to hate and despise itself. And it is a vanity of the same stamp to desire to be something else than what we are; the effect of such a desire does not at all touch us, forasmuch as it is contradicted and hindered in itself. ”

Excerpt From
The Essays of Montaigne — Complete
Michel de Montaigne

Making sense of death is for me characterized by the Freemason’s ritual passage, “Nature teaches us how to die.”

The Mason seeks to know in order to understand the biological phenomenon of death, acknowledging it as a terminal effect that results from the extinction of the homeostatic process in a living being, thereby resulting in the end of life.

He knows that homeostasis is a form of dynamic balance that consists of the ability of an organism to maintain a stable internal condition, compensating for changes in its environment through metabolism; and that metabolism is a vital process for all forms of life, which in the case of human beings begins at the moment of conception and ends with death, because when metabolism stops in a living being, death occurs, by the cessation of chemical reactions that takes place in the body cells to convert food into energy.

Talk of death is popular among religious thinkers who quickly divert the reality of death to a wide range of pronouncements founded on their dogmas. This in turn leads to obscurantism and ignorance about an inevitable process and natural as death is. Freemasonry has never aligned itself with any one religion except on the most peripheral border of current social convention and tradition.

Although it is true that one of the fundamental principles of Freemasonry is tolerance, it should not be conditioned to the complacency of any dogmatic thought about death, since any attempt to understand the mystery of death finds light in the reason and not dogma.

Every Mason is the owner of his truths and not of the truth, however, there is a universal truth, and this is the certainty that man has – the Mason – that he is going to die and feels death as a faithful companion and teacher, in such a way so that each Mason through the development of his symbolic mind begins to become aware of the meaning of death, of his death.

Addressing death by pragmatism is to me the most favourable application.  Certainly the loss of life by inopportune, untimely or tragic causes is regrettable.

Reason by observing nature teaches us that the universal order – hitherto known – is cyclical; everything in life is cyclical from birth to death.

Things and phenomena have always existed and only the way of looking at them, interpreting and understanding them is changing, according to the endless succession of the evolution of human thought.

The human being biologically destroys himself when he dies and his death is part of an evolutionary cycle, of multiple and varied vital transformations, with loss of form and transformation of energy.

There are scientific correspondents who touch upon the delicate subject of death:

We are made of the same matter as the stars, as the astronomer Harlow Shapley pointed out in 1929, in his article called ‘The stellar matter that man is’, published in the New York Times: ‘We are made of the same matter as the stars. So, when we study astronomy, we are somehow investigating our remote ancestry and our place in the Universe of stellar matter. Our own bodies are made up of the same chemical elements found in the most distant nebulae, and our activities are guided by the same universal rules.’

Rather than preoccupy my study with my inevitability, I have selected instead to focus upon the present only (from which by the way I as well exclude the past). Though I know this sounds an unimaginative intention, I believe I can say with certitude that the advance into old age can sometimes feel like stepping onto the stage of a play already in progress – and soon to reach its final curtain.

Removing oneself from this parallel is the easiest and only way I know of escaping the so-called existential dilemma surrounding death. It is besides in correspondence with another practical omission – that  is, fretting about the future generally (another of life’s diminishing roles should one choose to adopt it).

Existential crises are inner conflicts characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning and confusion about one’s personal identity. They are accompanied by anxiety and stress, often to such a degree that they disturb one’s normal functioning in everyday life and lead to depression. Their negative attitude towards meaning reflects characteristics of the philosophical movement of existentialism. The components of existential crises can be divided into emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects. Emotional components refer to the feelings, such as emotional pain, despair, helplessness, guilt, anxiety, or loneliness. Cognitive components encompass the problem of meaninglessness, the loss of personal values or spiritual faith, and thinking about death. Behavioral components include addictions, and anti-social and compulsive behaviour.

Thus denuded of my existential crises I am free once again to pursue my daily enterprise of wonder – not the least of which earlier today (as I sat on the balcony in the early morning sunshine) was the composition and facility of fly as it alighted nearby. However is the creature created? What governs the skilful construction and management of its wings? And, is not everything else that surrounds me similarly wondrous?