New Year's Eve 1971: I was nine years old and in third grade. My parents had just left for an evening on the town, and my grandparents were babysitting. For the first time, I was going to be allowed to stay awake until midnight. My grandparents had just attended the wake of a neighbor and had been telling my parents how good the deceased had looked "laid out", and I guess this had caused me to begin to think about death. I vividly recall the moment that I understood for the first time that I was going to die. The feeling was one of absolute terror which I felt in every part of my body. I had known intellectually that everyone died, but its meaning had never registered before.
Now sitting at my new, child sized desk, practising typing on my new typewriter by the Christmas tree, it suddenly sunk in that I too would one-day die. The thought that really struck terror into my heart was that when I died, there would be no more ME. I would cease to exist. I repeated this phrase mentally several times; scarcely able to contain the terror I was feeling. "No more me, no more me, no more ME".
My grandmother observed that I had "gone white as a sheet" and asked what was wrong. My grandmother and I were very close. She had always been a person who had good answers, someone I could tell anything to, and someone who had always made my world feel safe. But for the first time, I couldn't tell her what was bothering me. I knew that this time she'd have no answer, I knew that no one had an answer for death.
I tried to block the thought from my mind. I tried to think about other things. But over the next few weeks, the thought would visit me nearly everyday, in school, in church and worst in bed at night.
Oddly, despite that fact that I was being raised Catholic and attending Catholic school, the thought of an afterlife was no comfort at all. In fact, the things I had heard about heaven never crossed my mind during this entire time. I think this is because at a deep visceral level, all living creatures understand death and I had connected with that primordial, instinctual understanding of death that all creatures have which transcends theology, culture, and age. I was going to die. Someday there would be no more me. Even I lived to be 100 years old, the amount of time that would come after I was gone was infinite compared to the amount of time I would exist. I felt so incredibly insignificant and lost in relationship to the vastness of time.
Gradually, I found a way to cope with this unwelcome understanding which took me a step closer to adulthood. I adopted the attitude of Lucy from the Peanuts comic strip. In my favorite edition of this comic strip, Lucy and Charlie Brown are leaning on the brick wall where many of their philosophical discussions seem to take place. Charlie Brown asks, "Do you think the world will end in our lifetime?"
Lucy replies, "I try not to think about such things".
Charlie Brown pushes, "Well, now that I've brought it to your attention, what do you think?"
Lucy stops the discussion once and for all, "When things that I try not to think about are brought to my attention, I try not to think about them".
From New Year's Eve 1971, until Halloween 1994, I did a pretty good job of keeping the reality of my own death at a safe distance. Whenever this thing that I tried not to think about was brought to my attention; I tried not to think about it. I distracted myself. I ate chocolate, watched television, and went shopping. Then on Halloween 1994, I received a call that a childhood friend had died. Michael and I had never been close, but we were linked together throughout our lives in that inevitable way that relatives are. His parents and my parents were best friends and we always celebrated holidays together and took family vacations together. The last time I had seen him was two years earlier at his wedding. Now he was dead, killed in a bizarre accident while attending a Raiders game in Los Angeles.
His life hadn't been a happy one. He was a bitter, sarcastic, jaded, and at times, a cruel and abusive person. His entire life had seemed to many of us, a mission to punish his parents for divorcing when he was fifteen. He was a difficult person for even his mother to love. He hadn't been speaking to her at the time of his death, punishing her for some imagined slight. His sister, to whom I am quite close, admitted to ambivalent feelings over his death. On the one hand, she loved him. He was the only sibling she had. On the other hand, she remembered the times that he had come after her with a knife and she had had to flee the house in her nightgown, seeking refuge at a neighbor's. Or she recalled then times that he had shown his contempt for her friends by walking naked through the house when she had company, calling her guests vulgar names.
Even Michael's wife of two years was conflicted in her grief. Michael had been abusive and difficult to live with and he had told her that the marriage was over when he returned from California. Now that he would never return, she wouldn't have to face this. But she couldn't completely give herself over to mourning either. Her sorrow was mixed with relief.
At the funeral mass a few days later, the priest struggled for something to say about Michael. He knew that in reality, Michael's living had caused as much pain as his dying. Talk of him as a son, a brother, a husband would raise as many unhappy thoughts as comforting ones. Yet, he had to say something. He chose a safe subject: football. Michael had been a zealous fan of the Raiders and had, in fact, died attending one of their games. "Michael taught us about loyalty and spirit", Fr. Enright said. "No one loved the Raiders more than he did. Let us celebrate that and smile, and think of Michael the next time the Raiders win a game". That was it. Thirty-one years lived, and all that could safely be said was that Michael was a Raiders fan. To probe his life any more deeply than that would have caused pain and shown how little meaning Michael had brought to the business of living. Most funerals I had attended, regardless how sad, had in some way celebrated the lives of those who had passed. Michael's funeral lacked this celebratory element. The tragedy wasn't so much that he had died as that he had never really lived.
It suddenly occurred to me that this could have been MY funeral. What would the priest be able to safely say about me? I hadn't caused the pain that Michael had, but neither had I lived the most meaningful life I could have. How much time did I have left?
Sitting in St. Mary's Church that morning, I got the same feeling that I had had on New Year's Eve 1971. I surely had attended my share of funerals without ever having this feeling before. Perhaps it had taken the death of a peer to bring this long buried feeling back to the surface. Time hadn't taken any of the edge off the feeling. It was as terrifying as ever In fact, more so because this time it came with an adult's perspective on how quickly time passes. Unlike the first time, I could no longer distance myself from death with a child's unreal sense of time as infinite. The best I could attempt was to try not to think about it.
But, this didn't work either. Suddenly, the reality of my own mortality became a part of my daily awareness. When I realized that simply ignoring it no longer worked, I struggled for an alternative to dread and terror. Could death be accepted? I began to think about people who appeared at peace with death. I thought about my grandfather who regularly talked of his own demise. He hadn't seemed terrified. He appeared to accept death as a part of life. I recalled how he had planted a red leafed Maple tree in his front yard a few years before he died. Every evening in the summer, he and my grandmother would sit on the front porch and he'd say to her, "Josephine, we'll never sit in the shade of that tree". And, they never did. He didn't say this with anger or sadness. But with a tone of wistful acceptance of the natural order of things. Recalling this, it began to seem that this was the best any of us could do, accept the inevitable. And that if I were to find any peace, I'd better do the same. Where to start? Being a Unitarian Universalist, I decided to read books about death.
As I read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler Ross' On Death and Dying, and Helen Nearing's Light on Aging and Dying it became clear to me that a there could be such a thing as a good death. If I had had any concept of a good death prior to this reading it would have been a life lived unconsciously, blissfully unaware of one's own ending and then a sudden, swift, painless death. Now through these books and my own reflection I began to see that a good death was more likely the result of a life well lived, a life purposefully lived while informed by an abiding sense that life was a brief, contingent affair that could end at any moment without warning. I started to understand that simply accepting the inevitable was NOT the best any of us could do. Instead we could use our awareness of death to give meaning to life. Carlos Casteneda said, "Death is our eternal companion. It is always at our left, at arms length...Ask death's advice and drop the cursed pettiness that belongs to those who live their lives as if death will never tap them...Feel its presence all around you."
Put another way, David Copeland wrote: "Any act you perform may be your last...Is this the act that I would want as my final act on earth, is a question that will drop more pettiness and idiocy from your life than almost anything else."
And Yoshida Shoin phrased it this way: "Every morning, wake up thy mind to die. Every evening, freshen thy mind on the thought of death. Thus will thy mind be prepared. When thy mind is always set on death, thy way through life will be straight and simple."
I also read that several Buddhist meditation teachers recommended regular meditation on one's own death as a way of finding greater clarity in determining what matters in life and what doesn't. Several books instructed the reader to "sit with" the feeling of fear. The idea was that when the thought of death strikes, don't do as Lucy Van Pelt and try not to think about it, but let yourself fall totally into the thought. Let yourself experience the terror. I decided I'd have to try it sometime.
So it seemed that intellectually, anyway, I had an answer. Make friends with death. A good death is the result of a life well lived. Remaining aware of death gives meaning to life. I had the tools, but I still lacked the courage to use them. Although, I did make one meaningful change in my life: I quit my job and entered seminary. Death was becoming a friend, but I kept it at arm's length still. 1 wasn't yet ready to re-visit the feelings I'd had on New Year's Eve 1971 and stay with them.
The first time I attempted this, I was working as a chaplain at Northwestern Hospital in Chicago. It was the middle of the night and I had just left the hospice unit where a patient had died. I stopped by the chapel, which was dark and eerie at 3am. As I sat in the pew, I had the same, sinking feeling as I thought about my own death. It was terrifyingly familiar and I let myself feel it. It was awful. All of the intervening years and reflection and reading hadn't softened the reality one bit. It wasn't any better than it had been when I was nine years old. But somehow, I managed not to flee. I sat with it until it passed. And after a few minutes, it did pass. That kind of terror can only be sustained so long. But that wasn't the end. The next time was the same, and the time after that was the same. Each time I was gripped with terror and each time, it eventually passed.
And the aftermath of each of these occasions would be that, at least for a day or two, I'd hold my life more dearly and would be less likely to be bothered by the small things. My family and friends would seem more special to me to. And I would be more patient and tolerant of poor driving and other petty annoyances.
Yet, I was still ultimately unfulfilled because I was waiting for some profound insight that I thought was supposed to come from this practice of "sitting with" the reality of death. But for over a year this "eureka!" moment eluded me.
Then one evening I was watching the movie "Moonstruck" on the late, late show and the insight came to me. In one scene, the character played by Cher asks her mother why middle-aged married men chase after young women and the mother replies: "I think it's because they fear death". And the statement struck me as completely, 100% true. Our entire culture is terrified by death and goes to great lengths to deny death. We make youth, health, and beauty gods. We have millions of diversions and distractions. Addictions are common. Many modern theologians argue that at the heart of addiction and modem cultural complication is fear of death. And instead of "sitting with" the feeling, we handle it like Lucy and try not think about it.
So what was my "eureka"? It was that death controls our lives either way. It can either do so actively when we sit with the idea of death and use it to inform a conscious, deliberate life; or it can do so passively by causing us to fritter away our precious time eating too much, sedating ourselves in front of the television set, playing with the Internet, and shopping for trivial non-essentials. But either way, death comes. In the case of my friend Michael, death controlled his life passively. I doubt he ever gave it more than a passing thought. And so when it came, it wasn't a good death because the life that led to it had been lived unconsciously.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have all known people with terminal illnesses who faced their ordeals bravely and imbued their lives with meaning until their last breaths. These people allowed death to control their lives actively. The latter method is harder, but the reward is far greater.
In the early 1980's there was television documentary called "Scared Straight". It showed a program for delinquent teens, who were incarcerated in a real prison in the hopes that the experience would scare them to go straight. It reportedly had a high success rate. Fear is a powerful motivator. And thus, the terror that comes from sitting with the reality of our own death can serve as a motivator for us to live the kind of meaningful lives we all want to live.
And so, I invite each of you to embrace the terror. If you can't face it alone, face it with a friend. But try to face it. The rewards are rich. Death will come to each and every one of us. We have no power to stop it. But we do have within our grasp the ability to make our death a good death.
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