I Will Follow You Into the Dark

What do me, you, and a piece of roadkill all have in common?

State Route 56, also known as the Kuhio Highway, is the road that connects the more populous east side of Kauai to the secluded north side. It’s two lanes wide, and on most stretches the speed limit is 35 mph. If you’re staying in Princeville, as we were, your only option for getting there—unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg and can fly into a private airfield near your 1,500-acre oceanside plantation—is to take the 56 from Lihue, where the airport is, driving your rental car past small towns like Kapa’a and Anahola as you trace the road’s many curves. This exercise is good for getting into the “Aloha spirit,” for getting on “island time”—for slowing down, relaxing, and forgetting your troubles. In my case, of course, that primarily means cancer—the last few months of intense illness, chemotherapy, etc. Hawaii would be a chance to forget about all that, at least temporarily, to set aside pondering my and our mortality and focus instead on the smell of plumerias, the taste of fresh pineapple, the sight of—

“What’s that on the road?” Danielle asked, shortly after we passed the village of Kilauea. Something was lying on the dividing line, and it wasn’t one of the island’s many chickens. Was it a dog? A goat? A pig?

“Oh, nooo,” Danielle said.

Whatever it was, it was dead, probably recently so, given the condition of the corpse. Danielle suggested we stop the car and transfer the dead thing to the side of the road where it could more readily rest in peace, but hoisting dead flesh across highways is beyond the limits of my constitution. What we did instead was drive on to our nearby hotel, then proceed to pass by this thing nearly every day we were on the island, watching it transform from barely recognizable animal corpse to rotting mound of putrescence.

For the most part, our trip was magical—we got to see several sea turtles up close while snorkeling, swam in the ocean in the rain, hiked along a canyon to a waterfall. But every time we’d drive back to where we were staying, we’d pass this dead thing. It sounds bleak, and it is, especially for a pair of animal lovers like us. But there were a few times when we drove by that I found myself smiling. 

You gotta die from something. A lot of us have that dream scenario in our heads: passed away peacefully in her sleep. Sounds great to me: One minute you’re enjoying Garfield cartoons in bed, and the next minute death is gently embracing you during a REM cycle, maybe even in the middle of a really amazing sex dream. Over hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, it’s had to have happened.

But generally speaking, that’s not how it happens—not the sex dream, not the dying in your sleep. Some of us will die in car accidents or natural disasters, but most of us will get sick. Many of us will die in hospital beds, after long stays, attended by loved ones if we’re lucky. A lot of us will die from cancer. It’s just a statistical fact: The more we as a species extend our lifespans, the more likely it is we’ll develop cancer as we age. That’s why, despite countless medical breakthroughs, cancer is more prevalent today than it was a hundred or more years ago—back when the average life expectancy was closer to 50, you were more likely to die from consumption or misadventure before one of your cells decided to freakishly mutate and colonize your organs. But since shortly after World War II, life expectancies in the U.S. have risen consistently, now sitting in the upper 70s, which is great. But it means that, relative to other ways of dying, you’re more likely to die from cancer in 2023 than you might have been in 1923. Weird, huh?

Regardless of how we get there, we all end up in the same place, which is no place. We cease to exist. Our bodies, however, stick around. First, they grow stiff from rigor mortis, then bacteria in our intestines begin to digest organs and tissues, which produces gasses like methane and hydrogen sulfide, both of which stink, which means you stink, except you don’t, because you’re dead. Unless your body is cremated or shot into space, it will continue to decompose. The accumulation of gasses will cause it to bloat, with the skin turning greenish before it starts to peel away from underlying tissues. Eventually the gas will escape, causing the body to deflate, which is around the time the bugs start to appear. Is this fun to think about? Chances are it’s not, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.

In Buddhism, the term for contemplating our mortality is maraṇasati, which is a Pali word that means “mindfulness of death.” The Buddha suggested we practice maraṇasati all the time—literally with every breath. In the Buddha’s time, some yogis would live near cemeteries, where the bodies weren’t buried but just piled up. There the bhikkhus would sit, meditating on death as bodies decomposed all around them. There are, of course, easier and less fragrant ways of reflecting on death.

The benefits of practicing maraṇasati is that it can help us to focus on what’s most important during the limited time we have here. For example: When your body is reduced to a pile of bones that will eventually turn to dust, that argument you’re having with the coworker who slighted you may not seem like the kind of thing you should be losing so much sleep over. In fact, every single thing we experience in this world will eventually disappear—“gain and loss, disrepute and fame, blame and praise, pleasure and pain,” as the Buddha put it. Turns out you won’t be taking all those TikTok followers with you (which anyone who uses Twitter already knows). Mindfulness of death is a way for us to remember that ephemerality is life’s factory setting, and hopefully to prioritize accordingly.

Here’s another way of putting it, from someone else who had cancer:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

That’s Steve Jobs, who said these words during a commencement speech to Stanford grads in 2005, a year and a half after being diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that would eventually take his life. Today, October 5, is actually the twelfth anniversary of Jobs’ death, and his own cancer story is sufficiently interesting to warrant a separate examination, but we’re going to save that for a future newsletter. Suffice it to say: Steve Jobs was as close to a demigod as anyone our modern society has produced, and even he couldn’t defy death.

Jobs was also a Buddhist, so maybe he knew something about maraṇasati. Being mindful of death couldn’t save him, just as it won’t save any of us. But it does help put things in perspective, and that’s why I smiled when we passed that decomposing roadkill. Death comes for us all, even in paradise.

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This is the Healings Newsletter. It’s sent out on Thursdays.

It’s written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs.

It’s illustrated by Abner Clouseau, whose pen name we apologize for.

It’s about illness and recovery, and comes with jokes. 

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 “Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” — Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor