The Life of a Fruit Fly

Have I lived life in my time?

I have probably been thinking about death too much. At one point I was hyper-fixating on the meaning of life through the meaning of death, and then I had to correct myself. In my own personal view, in order to understand life, you must understand death, but not necessarily the meaning or the purpose of death. What I keep returning to is the significance of death. Meaning, at least in the way I am using the word here, is significance.

I think of a cup. You can call it half full or half empty, but the reality is that the cup has liquid. The liquid is there before I decide what to call it. Death is like that in one important sense. Death comes to us all. The interpretation can change. The belief can change. The fear can change. The significance can change. But I do not have to invent death in order for it to be part of life.

The Time I Am Living

Time existed before I was born, and time will continue after I am gone. It will not be my time anymore. It will be somebody else’s time. I am alive in a portion of time in which I can still act, choose, learn, change, love, repair, contribute, and become responsible for what I do next. I do not control time itself, and I do not control death. What I can examine is how I live while this is still my time.

That is why I question the way we talk about age. I hear people react to someone earning a bachelor’s degree around forty as if forty is already too late. Since when did forty become old? What life expectancy are we assuming when forty has already become the end of possibility? I have seen men in their sixties build a house hoping to die there of old age, while someone in their forties says they are too old to begin again. Neither one knows how much time remains.

The same thing happens with responsibility. I have a young child in my forties, and someone can say that is too old to have a child that young. But what if that same person has grandchildren? If one of their adult children died and they suddenly had to care for a four-year-old grandchild, would the responsibility of raising that child disappear because the parent died? Death can end one person’s participation without ending what still needs to be cared for.

The Past I Cannot Rewrite

I often imagine life like a carousel. Suppose I could stop it, step back into one moment, and change a decision that altered everything that followed. There would be one catch: changing that moment would also change the person I am today. Would I still change it if I knew the present I love could disappear with it?

I do not ask that because I think a wrong decision becomes right when something useful follows it. It does not. I ask it because regret and erasure are not the same thing. I can recognize that I made a decision I should not have made and still understand that I cannot select only the consequences I want to remove. Change the decision and the trajectory changes. The relationships, memories, lessons, responsibilities, and later decisions may change with it. There is no second life sitting beside this one for me to compare.

That is why the man I am today does not erase the man I was. Without the man I was, I would not be the man I am today. But that does not mean the lesson is simply not to make the same mistake again. I have to understand what caused me to make it.

Imagine someone who gets caught stealing. That person can study what went wrong, become more careful, and steal again without getting caught. That is learning. It may even be learning with progression. But the problem was never being caught. The problem was stealing. If the lesson only makes the same act easier to repeat, the pattern survived. Real change means learning to live without stealing, not learning to steal without being caught.

I have to apply that inward. Am I capable of making mistakes? Yes. Am I capable of failing, even in serious ways? Yes, because I have done it. Knowing that does not require me to live as the person I was. It requires me to watch the patterns that made those decisions possible. I cannot erase the past. I can try not to recreate it.

A tree makes more sense to me than erasure. A tree does not become the exact same tree from season to season. Each season leaves something. Each year adds another ring. A scar does not become the whole tree, but neither does the tree become what it is by pretending the scar never happened. I think people are more like that. We accumulate layers. The newest layer does not erase the oldest one.

The Rose, the Moon, and What We Call the Pinnacle

I started reaching for these ideas through ordinary things. A rose is admired when it grows and blossoms. We pay attention to the stage we call beautiful, and we pay less attention to decline. But the blossom is not the whole life of the plant. The cycle matters to how we understand the blossom. The analogy stops there. A rose does not prove anything about an afterlife or about what human death means. It only reminds me that focusing on the most visible stage can make us forget the rest of the development.

The moon gives me another version of the same problem. People remember the full moon because it is the visible pinnacle, but the full moon is not the whole cycle. We do something similar with human life. We say someone made it to adulthood, made it to ninety, had a long life. But what type of life did those ninety years accumulate? What did the person experience? What shaped that person? What did that person learn, damage, repair, contribute, or become? Duration tells me how long the life lasted. It does not tell me the life.

When Death Was at the End of the Bed

My understanding of death cannot be separated from watching my mother die. She went through cancer and treatment more than once. Treatment prolonged her life, and it also prolonged periods of suffering. That does not mean she wanted to die. Even near the end, she wanted to live, or at least that is what I saw in her fight to remain with us.

Near the end, I went to see her after she had been given very little time. She looked at me and said, “You’re here with me because I’m dying.” I lied to her. I told her, “I’m here because I want to be here with you.” She knew. She knew death was circling around her. Her children, grandchildren, friends, and family gathered. We watched her weaken. When she had enough energy to look a little better, people wanted to believe she was getting better. We wanted to see life because she was still alive.

When a person is dying from a terminal illness, death can end the physical suffering we watched that person endure. From the perspective of those who remain, we may say the person is no longer in pain. That is not the same thing as saying death was desirable, that the person wanted it, or that death should be pursued. My mother taught me that those ideas have to remain separate.

Her death also made me wrestle with belief. Human beings have a need to believe in something beyond what we know. God. An afterlife. Continuation. Nothingness. I do not know what happens after death. I can believe, question, hope, or doubt, but belief is not the same thing as knowledge. The question that matters to me is what belief does to the life we are living now. Does belief in another life make this one more significant, or does it tempt us to say that whatever is wrong here is only temporary and therefore easier to tolerate?

Choosing Life

At my lowest point in life, I thought death was the only way out. Family members helped me. Therapy helped me. Eventually medication helped me. I do not use that experience as an explanation for everyone else. I can only say what it meant in my life.

What became clearer to me is that choosing death would not change the past. It would not return me to the moment before a decision. It would only remove me from the life of the people I love and from whatever choices still remain in front of me. The people who love me now know the person I am now. Going backward and changing one moment might change all of that, and there is no guarantee that the replacement life would be better.

So I do choose life. I choose it knowing that the past remains part of me. I choose it knowing I am still capable of failure. I choose it because I can examine the patterns that led me where I do not want to return, and I can live today in a way that does not deliberately recreate them.

The Life of a Fruit Fly

That brings me back to duration. We tend to treat a long life as if length itself proves that the life was good or complete. I do not think it does. A short life does not automatically lose significance because it was short, and a long life does not automatically gain significance because it lasted longer. What matters to me is what happened inside the time that belonged to that life.

The life of a fruit fly is now complete. That sentence stayed with me because a life does not have to match my preferred measurement of time before it can have been a life. The fruit fly does not need ninety human years to complete its own span. The analogy does not tell me what happens after death. It tells me that duration and significance are not the same measurement.

Have I lived life in my time? Death will come in my time, and my life will have been lived in my time. No amount of rushing or worrying will end time. Long after my life is over, time will still exist because it existed before my life began. Death will arrive in my time, and even though I am not in control of death, it will come to me within my lifetime.

Have I lived life? Have I lived the time over which I have control? If the answer is yes, death will not lose its significance; it will give meaning through the purpose of my life. Have I played the character of my time, or have I lived life as the character I had control over becoming?

In the comedy that ends in death, I hope to have played my part to its fullest.

Orlando J. Alvarez