The simple man believes every word,
but the prudent man watches his steps.
Proverbs 14:15 (BSB).
Image generated with the assistance of Microsoft Word
I write because I'm dying. Not just in the poetic or existential sense, but in the very real, very inevitable way that all humans face. We are all participants in a march toward an endpoint; death is the silent tailor who took our measurements at birth, our final outfit meticulously prepared without our consent. But is the looming spectre of death truly a fundamental reason to write?
When I consider the ancient artists who left their handprints on the walls of the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina, I see a timeless desire to declare existence. Like them, my writing is a proclamation: "I was here." It's my method of defying the oblivion that death promises—a refusal to fade quietly.
Yet, there is another reason, intimately linked to this defiance of mortality, and that is the preservation of identity. The dead, after all, suffer a grave injustice at the hands of the living: they cannot defend themselves against misrepresentation or slander. They cannot participate in the narratives crafted about their lives, much like the characters in Máirtín Ó Cadhain's novel, The Dirty Dust, who, even in the afterlife, clamour to have their stories told rightly.
My family harbours a tale of a great uncle, a story that illustrates this point vividly. He allegedly answered the door to a foreign salesman peddling goods from a suitcase. In a moment of questionable judgment, he seized the suitcase and shut the door. As the salesman pounded on the door and peered through the keyhole, my uncle supposedly jabbed a toothpick into his eye. This story, patently absurd, morphs with each retelling. While many dismiss it as nonsense, there are always a few, perhaps those more credulous or less inclined to critical thinking, who entertain it as fact.
This anecdote, over time, has grown legs, as stories often do, shaped by biases and the whims of the storyteller. Yet, it underscores a crucial point: without a voice, without a defender, anyone's life story can be twisted into a grotesque caricature of the truth — I also take this as a personal warning as one of the traits God hates is "a false witness who pours out lies" according to Proverbs 6.
Thus, I write to claim my narrative, to ensure that my voice echoes beyond the silence of the grave. In writing, I defend not only my existence but my essence from being misrepresented or forgotten. It's an act of preservation as much as it is an act of creation—a laying down of memories in a form that can speak long after I cannot.
Writing, therefore, becomes an act of both defiance and defence. It is a way to exist beyond the temporal boundaries set by our physical bodies, allowing us to claim both our space and our truth in a world that will move forward without us. Just as those ancient handprints reach out from their stone canvases, my words reach out from the page, a testament to the life I lived and the truths I held dear.
