Apoptosis

In reality, for me the year never begins in January, but in September. School years are engraved in my brain as life cycles, and the smell of the plastic textbook cover as that signal that announces that something new is about to arrive.

Summer, the time in which the pause is allowed to enter, allows me to do that exercise of looking back, observing the year, laughing with the security of someone who is already safe, at my usual tragic sense of life, and formulate the classic resolutions for the new year: take care of body and soul, see more of family and friends, make time for myself, not take everything so personally, walk more, look at the horizon more, suffer less, write more, live more.

And it is on those days, when the air becomes colder and the days shorter, when a natural phenomenon happens that proves us right for those of us who believe that this is really when the year changes: the fall of the leaves. of the trees. Those of us who love walking and observing notice the transcendental nature of this spectacle. A small death, a mandatory transit so that life can be born again in those branches reduced to skeletons.

I would always be clinging to my grandmothers’ hands, to their smell of moisturizing cream and their soft touch, to the past “I love yous”

French Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur tells us in her beautiful book Live with our deadwhich this phenomenon is called “apoptosis”. When Delphine was studying medicine, she discovered that, like many of our organs, our fingers are formed by cell death. Originally, in the womb, our hand is palm-shaped and little by little, the fingers separate through the destruction of the cells that joined them. A similar process occurs with the heart, intestines or nervous system.

The human body is sculpted through the death of the elements that compose it. The disappearance of a part of ourselves allows our organs to function. Therefore, we owe life to the death that is wrought in it: “Thus pass the seasons of existence; Trees and human beings only remain alive if death visits them. “Spring comes only to those who experience apoptosis…”

In December, however, at the official change of the year, a different sensation invades me. This urgency of closure, this cold and this absence of light in the afternoons lead me to settle into something more similar to melancholy, and all this shedding of letting go, of letting go to allow the new to enter seems to me to be a narrative construction to which We cling to give meaning to our lives. Honestly, I don’t want to let go. I would always be clinging to my grandmothers’ hands, to their smell of moisturizing cream and their soft touch, to the past “I love yous”, to the friends of my youth, to the vitality of my parents. I would carry all those green leaves on me until they wouldn’t let me walk.

The only thing I like about changes is that they invite us to be storytellers, to invent words to inhabit them and plots to navigate them because we have no other choice.

There is a beautiful moment in the series Yo, adicto by Javier Giner, a gem that I cannot help but recommend. Javier, masterfully played by Oriol Pla, tells his therapist: “This was never really about drugs, was it? “I was going to learn to live.” Like a shock, that phrase stuck in my mind, due to its depth and truth. Because isn’t that what we’re all into? In learning to live?

Delphine Horvilleur finished medical school, but decided not to practice and become a rabbi: “I chose to assist the living in another way.” When asked what exactly her job entails, she is clear: she is a storyteller. “I accompany women and men who at a crucial moment in their lives need stories,” she explains.

Perhaps this is the only thing I like about changes, that they invite us to be storytellers, to invent words to inhabit them and plots to navigate them because we have no other choice. Maybe therein lies the true art of learning to live, in knowing how to locate the painful silences, the dramatic pauses, the commas… In being able to rewrite and revise the stories we have told ourselves, in finding ourselves in the stories of others, in knowing that as long as we are alive, we have blank pages ahead of us.

In these last days of December, when life drags us forward and the happy apoptosis does not ask our permission, I try to protect it in little bottles of formaldehyde, in pages of a diary or a script, who knows, or simply in compartments of the memory, everything that was important to me. Actually, I’m just trying to organize it, find a story that helps me not get lost in the chaos. That was it, right? That was learning to live.

#Apoptosis