The Color of Death

I used to believe in the void. I thought that is where I would go when I died. But now I feel uncertain.

...

I had a conversation with a painter. I asked, "What is the color of death."

I thought she would say black, but she said, "Brown."

"I think it's gray," I said. "Gray is the color of death. Not black. Not white. Gray is the color at the end of the universe, when nothing happens: no tension left to spark anything."

"Well," she said, "I've never seen the end of the universe. But if you look at something dead, you'll see that it decays and feeds new life."

She is quite the empiricist, I thought. But what about me? What about my death?  What will life be like after I turn into ten-thousand flies?

Perhaps death has no color. It is a lens—a magnifying glass, a telescope, a prism. Thereby we may bring the infinite into focus.


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