Face Death: A Warriors Guide to Writing Your Death Poem - Paperback

by Matthew Black (Author)

Every warrior eventually meets the one opponent he cannot outfight. This is a field manual for that meeting.

We all must die, quickly or slowly our time in this mortal coil is ending and that is the cold reality of the human condition. For centuries, the samurai faced death by writing a jisei - a death poem composed close to the final hour, a few rich intense descriptors meant to prove that a man could hold his composure, honesty and maybe a little gallows humor even as everything ended. Face Death takes that ancient discipline and puts it back into your hands.

This is a book about dying, and about the grief that dying leaves behind. It is written for anyone who has stood close to the end, lost the person beside them, and been told to keep moving. It refuses the easy comforts. It does not promise that time heals or that the dead are in a better place. It is specifically written towards our societies fighting cadre as well as our service men and women who like the samurai must be both realistic and stoic about mortality.

Drawing on the martial traditions of Japan, China and Korea, from Stoic philosophy, and the modern science of grief, Face Death moves through the whole arc of loss - making peace before it comes, carrying the fallen, mourning the deaths the world won't let you mourn, surviving the guilt of outliving others, and finally meeting your own end on your own terms. Along the way it teaches the reader to do what the old warriors did: find the single true image, set it down in a few honest words, and stop.

Part meditation, part method, part elegy, this is a book for readers of grief, philosophy, and military memoir alike - for anyone willing to look directly at the thing we spend our lives avoiding. Because the mind that has already faced death has nothing left to fear.

Write the line while you still can.