Today I took the afternoon off and traveled (somewhat awkwardly, since the Chicago Transit Authority hasn’t seen fit to map out its train lines for my convenience and therefore I had to go somewhat north of where I wanted to go before I could start heading west) to the National Museum of Mexican Art in the lovely, largely Latino neighborhood of Pilsen. I decided to go because I’d seen an event listing about their 2008 Dia De Los Muertos exhibit in the Chicago Reader that read, in part, as follows:

…by the time you stagger back out into the street you feel like some preposterously talented craftsman has taken out your skull, carved it all over with intricate whorls, painted it with bright primary colors, and slapped it back onto your neck so hard that your teeth rattle….In Carlomagno Pedro Martinez’s ceramic Mexico Giving Birth to Its People, probably the single most disturbing image of the show, a black turkey with a human skull for a head sits atop a pile of skeletons struggling to get free…Diana Solis’s Playing War is a delicate drawing of two boys—one, with a skull and antlers in place of his own head, flying kites made of cadaverous, cartoony animal heads; the other merging with a tree as he holds onto one of its branches, which is also a rifle.

I mean, how could I resist a sell like that? I could not. So I strapped on my boots and my dashing green jacket and headed off, conveniently collecting a fellow museum-seeker on the last leg of my journey; he attempted to ask me for directions in halting Spanish and seemed as reluctant as I was to make small talk after we discovered we were both going to the same place (phew).

The exhibit did not make me feel quite as much as though I were having a spectacularly moody acid trip as the Reader listing had led me to believe it would, but it was definitely my kind of artwork. I think I can say with some confidence that seeing skeletons arranged in a random assortment of everyday scenes is never going to not delight me. I particularly enjoyed the three skeleton photo-enthusiasts crouched in appropriately uncomfortable-looking picture-taking poses, one with a Nikon, one with a Canon, and one with a Kodak (”Untitled”). There was also a large diorama that was populated by not only a skeleton bull engaged in a fight with a skeleton fighter, but a skeleton parrot, a bone-chewing skeleton dog, skeleton card-players, and a skeleton mom wearing a tiny skeleton baby in a wrap. And I think I may have snorted altogether more audibly than was polite at a piece called “The Last Supper,” in which twelve winged angels were perched above a skeleton crew of Jesus and the apostles; my laughter came not because the scene was inherently absurd, but because in the world of the dead the last supper apparently consists of large slices of watermelon. Also, Jesus, while just as bony as everyone else, appeared to be wearing a blond wig.

I saw some gorgeous pieces I would have loved to hang on my own wall, including two unapologetically polychromatic yarn paintings (did you know such a thing existed? They tightly coil yarn onto a wood panel, using wax as the adhesive. It is gorgeous). I saw ofrenda after amazing ofrenda. Some of them were dedicated to celebrating the lives and habits of lost relatives—one had a photo of the dearly departed exuberantly digging his nose, which actually did make me laugh out loud, and one included a skeleton smoking a large cigar. Some were simply altars commemorating the day itself, mounded with bread, fruit, flowers, candles, masks, and figures of cherubs and butterflies.

It was all beautiful, and it all made me surer than ever that there is something solidly, wholeheartedly right in accepting, if not embracing, the fact of death as the major fact of life—indeed, to recognize death as the very thing that gives life any shape at all. The simple, pretty text that ribboned its way through one painting struck me as so lovely, in that context, that I wrote it down so that I could remember it:

We come but to sleep. We come but to dream. It is not true that we come to live upon this earth. Like the grass, each spring we are transformed. Our hearts grow green, put forth their shoots. Our body is a flower. It blossoms, and then it withers.

A couple of months ago Anya wrote about her overwhelming fear and resentment of death, and in a way this is my offering to her, my letter from an entirely different point of view. I have never been afraid of death. I’m pretty sure everyone feels immune to its sting, above its greedy clutch, when they are young and bright with hubris, and I was no different. But though I have grown older and less smug, death has grown no more fearful. In a way, I am obsessed by it: I love to read about its physical mechanisms, seek out memoirs written by those who are grieving, and find myself, far more often than makes Ross comfortable, imagining how he or I may one day perish. Yet none of this brings cold fire to my soul.

Sometimes I worry about this fact. I think of Dylan Thomas and his advice to us, and I worry that my lack of rage on the subject means I am doing something wrong, not living as well or as fully as I should. I have wondered, in fact, if in order to count poets and philosophers my true company I must dig deep in my heart for the wild, glaring rancor I ought to be feeling. I searched for that rancor as I listened to a Radiolab episode some months ago whose closing segment was a haunting, ethereal collage of voices, each telling how they wake up in the middle of the night gripped by the realization of their own death and are paralyzed by it. I found only a curious calm, a calm curiosity.

I am no fool. I realize that, in the face of the specific vehicle of my own death, there is almost no chance I will escape the feelings of vast anger and rich fright—unless I am lucky enough to go old, peaceful, and accomplished. I know I will feel no calm, but a raging storm of injustice, the first time I lose someone whose shape is closely stitched into my heart. And I am not a huge fan of pain and suffering, for myself or for anyone else.

But death in the abstract? The idea of death? It seems strange to say this, but in a very real way I almost cherish it. Not because I do not treasure my life as a sweet and jeweled thing full of wondrous joy and wondrous torment; I do. Not because I believe that my reward is in heaven; I do not.

I think I cherish the idea of death because it brings me peace. The frontier of death foreshortens the dimensions of my life, lightens my greatest struggles until they become—not trivial, but marvelously insubstantial. Knowing that death has claimed every breathing being that has ever lived upon this earth, knowing that the very atoms of my body would not exist if it were not for the deaths of those who came before me, and that my eventual death will feed the bodies of those who follow me, I cannot help but be grateful. I cannot help but be tranquil. Understanding that I will die, I feel, more than anything else, incredibly free.

I know that this line of reasoning—if reasoning it even is—does not run the same way through everyone’s mind. Ross doesn’t feel quite as I do, I don’t think. And Anya may not find my words particularly comforting. But these things filled me up today, and I thought that if I did not share them while they were with me so clearly it might be a long while before they swam into focus again.

So here they are. And here I am. And here is Death, attending us all, while Life in its turn goes on without end.