It's the end of another year and I'm still around, although sadly, my husband did not make it to his 77th birthday which would have happened on December 31. Since my mother died at age 63 in 1982, this is the first time I have had to face the death of a loved one. Trying to make sense of his dying makes no sense. A year and a half ago he was walking three miles a day, healthy and happy, and then the kind of back pain that at 76 one assumes is just that turned out to be cancer, and the cancer turned out to be bigger than all the powers that medicine could bring to him. And that, my friends, is life.
I have learned over the past year and a half that I am not alone in my obsession with death. The evidence is everywhere. For example, the weather forecast for today's Onion reads: "75 -- Sunny -- still one day closer to death, though."
I'm currently reading Smoke Gets In Your Eyes : And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty. She is a young woman who has decided to tackle her lifelong fear of death by going to work at a crematory. She is expecting that facing the death of others -- and actually participating in the postmortem ritual -- will allow death to become just another part of her life.
That's a bit of what I have been doing lately, but without the ashes. Here is some of what I have come up with:
A quick death -- a massive heart attack, a fall from a tall building, a fatal crash -- happens so quickly that a person cannot possibly register enough pain to think, "This is unbearable." That would be a good thing.
A long, painful death, as with the evil beast cancer, I believe is a game of "Let's Make a Deal" that doesn't end until, well, it ends. We weigh the amount of pain caused by both the cancer and the treatments with the amount of hope we have for the time we have left. Those of us who are so inclined pray and try to look forward to a pain-free afterlife.
I find the whole idea of afterlife fraught with confusion and contradictions. Like, I'm assuming that most who believe in life after death think in terms of being reunited with those they love. How about those they don't love? How about those they love who don't love them? Maybe when you leave your body behind your soul also sheds all those petty aggravations. But then what happens? Are you and all your wives and exes just friends? Do you hang out with the boss you couldn't stand? And does he (or she) treat you well, or just the same as everybody else up there?
What about the things you loved here on earth? Good food, football, the beach, spy novels: if these are the things that define you, when you get to heaven do you get to have them all, or do you no longer need them, and in that case, then, who the heck are you? That would pretty much make us all one spiritual blob, or maybe millions of singular blobs, indistinguishable one from another, wouldn't it?
Lots of authors have tried to visualize heaven, some of them narcissistic enough to publish their work as non-fiction. Some talk to a voice they claim is God, and who basically tells them everything they want to hear about life after death. Hard to find someone who says, "You know, God contacted me the other day and said I was totally wrong about the afterlife." The exception to that is all those people who weren't worried about dying until they were, and then they suddenly "found" God, who astonishingly did not tell them shame on you, you are going to hell, but instead was so happy they had stumbled upon Him that he gave him a pass into heaven.
I realize I am ruminating here, but, hey, that's what this blog is supposed to be about, okay? I had hoped to write a funny piece about death and dying, because humor has helped me with all kinds of trauma and tragedy in my life. But it's not easy. Maybe because death is THE irrational thing about life. I could be sitting here writing this thing on death and then.... nothing.
Seems to me Terry Pratchett has nailed the concept of Death. Death, the character in Discworld who is responsible for collecting us when it's time, speaks in all capital letters. Death wears the traditional garb, and at the time where you may or may not be dying, you just might have a conversation with Death. In The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, Maurice bargains away one of his lives so that a rat can live. That is probably about as believable about any entering heaven story you might come up with.
Because living and dying are such baffling concepts, and we are persistent in our attempts to find meaning in our being here, we continue to make up stories that allow us to go on as though our existence makes sense. But the fact is: we are here and then we are not, except for the compostable material. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is just delighted by how huge is space and how infinitesimal and insignificant are we. I suppose that is the quintessence of the defense mechanism of reaction formation, converting your terror into delight at an inevitable horror. I have to admit, I like it. It matters not that Neil DeGrasse Tyson is brilliant and will be remembered in history as long as people exist and think and that I have, well, this blog. It is still a perspective that makes more sense than we are all going up to this place where nobody will have any negative feelings about anybody and for that matter will no longer have positive feelings about earthly stuff.
This is what I think about death. Death is sleep at the end of a continuum. When we go to sleep, we don't consciously fall asleep. And we all think the best sleep is the dreamless sleep. So when I go I like to think that it will be just like falling asleep. And then there will be nothing left of me except all the stuff I have that my family will be stuck getting rid of. And I won't be around to feel bad about it.
What could be wrong with that?
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