Death - to even put it so boldly as a heading seems wrong, as if the writer were, at best, a teen-age Goth struggling with adolescent angst and alienation. In fact, this writer has been criticized for being too melodramatic about life by writing about death, and the criticism is a good one. Why should we dwell on the inevitable and the unknowable? And why get worked up over something that everyone must face (unlike, as they say, taxes)?
And that is correct in its way. My son asked me this morning how it is that soldiers will march into almost certain death, en masse. I did not even have to think about the response: "Because the officers will shoot them if they run. It's called desertion in the face of the enemy." Yes, there is camaraderie and self-respect, but really, if it weren't for the certain discipline of the army, when the going got tough, just about everyone would get going. And that is what might happen if we think about death too much. Not only would we miss life's good moments, but we would all start a panic, a stampede that would go nowhere because there is no where to go. But that doesn't stop people from panicking and trampling one another in a locked building on fire.
No; we learn to live by not accepting the reality of death. I once asked my mother, who had four children and would have had more if possible, how women stand the pain of childbirth, again and again. She told me, "you forget about the pain. It disappears almost as if it never happened. It's strange." That is not true with all women, I know, but true enough - and so it is with death. We do not forget our actual death, but we pass it over each time someone we know dies. Yes, it will happen to us someday - but that someday is in a never-never world. If we really believed it, we might just run around with our hair on fire, every one of us.
And yet: in death is the key to understanding life. It is almost never a pleasant thing, this death, and when faced squarely, it is impossible to be overly-dramatic about it. It is more intense, more real than anything we will face in our lives. If it occurs quickly, it destabilizes everyone who knows the deceased - thus cultures around the world have spooky taboos about sudden or violent death (we ourselves live in horror of suicide, which I think we should). And if it occurs slowly, as it usually does these days, it is ugly, very ugly. The 19th century Anglo nations spent quite a lot of effort romanticizing death, but in the end it still amounted to foul breath, soiled bed sheets and the screams or moans or pained faces of those undergoing their ordeal, one often worse than anything Torquemada could invent. This is waht waits for most of us. How can this ever be over-dramatized?
The key to understanding: as of this moment, my mother is in her last hours. I am told that her breathing is shallow, her movements jumpy, her weak 89 year old heart pumping at 160 beats a minute, enough to kill an athlete if prolonged. She is going through what is called the death cascade, where one organic emergency sparks another, and at her age and with her conditions it is unstoppable. She can no longer eat or drink, and no one is trying to make her do these things anymore. The stage is set. It is not pretty. Her shriveled 80 pound husk quakes and emits regularly, her equanimity maintained, as such it can be, with a slow morphine drip - at least we have that. My relatives who are watching this all are thinking the same thing - this, someday, will be us. But we don't run in panic, only feel the shivers of its probabilities before they fade into hazy memory, like a long-ago birth.
And yet - just as ephemeral beauty covers functionality in life, so functionality covers beauty in death. The ephemeral beauty is long gone, and has in fact turned to the ugliness of crumbling functionality. But something else, right at this point, seems to take over. It is a different sort of haze, not one of forgetfulness, but one of memory; it seems, at the end game of death, that we begin to remember, and it is not the hidden pain of the functional past, but the greatness of something that we somehow understand has been forgotten. We sense it, sometimes, in memories from early childhood, and understand from this that what we have forgotten from this childhood is only a metaphor - a big, living metaphor - of what we have forgotten in life; that beneath, beyond, that all around life is a greatness that we long for, that has been covered up by what is really, in the great picture, the most minor of things - that functionality of living that we so prized and fought so hard to control in our maturation process. But in that we lost the deeper beauty that resides in this world only so fleetingly.
I hope to never be Pollyannish about this thing, this ugly thing of death. It is a disaster to most of us - certainly to me - of the greatest proportions. But it can't help but tell us in its no-nonsense ass-kick way that beneath it all (and around it and so on) is the big one - the dream, the great, what we have forgotten.
Inside out, outside in, around and around it goes, beauty and ugliness and death and truth; but for the dying, the game ends, or so they say. They say - those experts who have witnessed it so many times - tell us that in the end, a peace comes like a light, like angel wings at the last moment, and I believe them. I have felt it too. But it is no romanticist poetry, no - it is as hard and fearful as all that nature can give us - as it has to be, for what else could make us forget the beauty but this fear, this ugly greatness? And how else to show its strength, this light after death, than to weather the most agonizing ordeal? In that is the mystery, the ultimate triumph, but by God, no quest is any harder. FK
And that is correct in its way. My son asked me this morning how it is that soldiers will march into almost certain death, en masse. I did not even have to think about the response: "Because the officers will shoot them if they run. It's called desertion in the face of the enemy." Yes, there is camaraderie and self-respect, but really, if it weren't for the certain discipline of the army, when the going got tough, just about everyone would get going. And that is what might happen if we think about death too much. Not only would we miss life's good moments, but we would all start a panic, a stampede that would go nowhere because there is no where to go. But that doesn't stop people from panicking and trampling one another in a locked building on fire.
No; we learn to live by not accepting the reality of death. I once asked my mother, who had four children and would have had more if possible, how women stand the pain of childbirth, again and again. She told me, "you forget about the pain. It disappears almost as if it never happened. It's strange." That is not true with all women, I know, but true enough - and so it is with death. We do not forget our actual death, but we pass it over each time someone we know dies. Yes, it will happen to us someday - but that someday is in a never-never world. If we really believed it, we might just run around with our hair on fire, every one of us.
And yet: in death is the key to understanding life. It is almost never a pleasant thing, this death, and when faced squarely, it is impossible to be overly-dramatic about it. It is more intense, more real than anything we will face in our lives. If it occurs quickly, it destabilizes everyone who knows the deceased - thus cultures around the world have spooky taboos about sudden or violent death (we ourselves live in horror of suicide, which I think we should). And if it occurs slowly, as it usually does these days, it is ugly, very ugly. The 19th century Anglo nations spent quite a lot of effort romanticizing death, but in the end it still amounted to foul breath, soiled bed sheets and the screams or moans or pained faces of those undergoing their ordeal, one often worse than anything Torquemada could invent. This is waht waits for most of us. How can this ever be over-dramatized?
The key to understanding: as of this moment, my mother is in her last hours. I am told that her breathing is shallow, her movements jumpy, her weak 89 year old heart pumping at 160 beats a minute, enough to kill an athlete if prolonged. She is going through what is called the death cascade, where one organic emergency sparks another, and at her age and with her conditions it is unstoppable. She can no longer eat or drink, and no one is trying to make her do these things anymore. The stage is set. It is not pretty. Her shriveled 80 pound husk quakes and emits regularly, her equanimity maintained, as such it can be, with a slow morphine drip - at least we have that. My relatives who are watching this all are thinking the same thing - this, someday, will be us. But we don't run in panic, only feel the shivers of its probabilities before they fade into hazy memory, like a long-ago birth.
And yet - just as ephemeral beauty covers functionality in life, so functionality covers beauty in death. The ephemeral beauty is long gone, and has in fact turned to the ugliness of crumbling functionality. But something else, right at this point, seems to take over. It is a different sort of haze, not one of forgetfulness, but one of memory; it seems, at the end game of death, that we begin to remember, and it is not the hidden pain of the functional past, but the greatness of something that we somehow understand has been forgotten. We sense it, sometimes, in memories from early childhood, and understand from this that what we have forgotten from this childhood is only a metaphor - a big, living metaphor - of what we have forgotten in life; that beneath, beyond, that all around life is a greatness that we long for, that has been covered up by what is really, in the great picture, the most minor of things - that functionality of living that we so prized and fought so hard to control in our maturation process. But in that we lost the deeper beauty that resides in this world only so fleetingly.
I hope to never be Pollyannish about this thing, this ugly thing of death. It is a disaster to most of us - certainly to me - of the greatest proportions. But it can't help but tell us in its no-nonsense ass-kick way that beneath it all (and around it and so on) is the big one - the dream, the great, what we have forgotten.
Inside out, outside in, around and around it goes, beauty and ugliness and death and truth; but for the dying, the game ends, or so they say. They say - those experts who have witnessed it so many times - tell us that in the end, a peace comes like a light, like angel wings at the last moment, and I believe them. I have felt it too. But it is no romanticist poetry, no - it is as hard and fearful as all that nature can give us - as it has to be, for what else could make us forget the beauty but this fear, this ugly greatness? And how else to show its strength, this light after death, than to weather the most agonizing ordeal? In that is the mystery, the ultimate triumph, but by God, no quest is any harder. FK
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