Death...the most mysterious, mystifying and arresting moment of our life

 Our puppy, Tasha, picked up a dead bird this morning, and contrary to her usual compliance when her adults attempt to remove those unwanted, undesirable, and potentially risky things from her mouth, this time she was much more adamant, her jaw tightly clamped shut. Domesticated she may be becoming; however, we can never let go of the notion that she is a part of nature’s animals…..as are we!

There is something both welcome and a little disturbing in our discovery. Her basic instincts are intact; and so, apparently, are ours to find dead creatures a little off-putting. It is the way we respond to death that continues to fascinate, to puzzle, to generate anxiety, confusion, ambiguity and a fair bit of avoidance, if not outright denial.

And then, we find on this same morning, an obituary of a treasured colleague, a retired high school Phys Ed teacher, and consummate basketball coach. Roy suffered from cancer, and finally succumbed to its ravages. His wife was a classmate while an undergraduate at Western, so long ago that the names of the shared professors have faded into dust.

There is a universal funereal drum beat throughout the last two years, with millions having to face the death of one or more of their loved ones too often to COVID, while the drum beat of all of the other lethal illnesses continues, far from the headlines and the television and the internet. We can, after all, tolerate only so much grief in a prolonged period. And the grief of my classmate this morning at the loss of her beloved Roy intermingles involuntarily, imperceptibly, and universally with the wave of grief in so many locations (from 2014 through 2020-Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Ukraine, Somalia, Pakistan, South Sudan,  Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon,  Myanmar).

Juxtaposing those international deaths, mostly from armed conflict astride the death of a former endeared colleague, however, is an act none of us performs, or even considers, in the moments of our grief. Our grief is legitimately, authentically, and even naturally, one of life’s most profound emotional experiences. We read books about the subject; we attend support groups to share it; we privately weep in our most private, and possibly secret, places; we (some of us) pray about ‘meeting again’ in an afterlife; some of us commit to sharing hours, even days in the company of grieving families, as part of our spiritual journey; others of us spend protracted period of time in hospital and hospice rooms with our palliative friends and family members, in the hope and belief that our support will somehow offer a quiet, peaceful, gentle, and honourable passing. There is also little doubt that our presence in those rooms where the dying are ending their lives changes us in ways sometimes too mysterious for us to grasp.

Of course, we will miss those whose lives have intersected with our own. Of course, we will commiserate with those near and dear to us who suffer their unique loss(es). Some of us will pay respects by visiting funeral homes, others by offering flowers or memorial gifts to the charity of the deceased’s choice. Still others will plant a tree, a more recent act of commemoration, linked in part to the restoring of the life of the planet.

Nevertheless, there is a language and social vacuum in our lay-person approach to families in grief, especially those whose lives have touched ours briefly, or from a distance. There is a ‘guardedness’ about our sensibility and our sensitivity when in the presence of death. There is a quiet mask to our confused uncertainty about our own having to face this inevitable, unmistakable, unavoidable and ultimate truth: our own mortality.

Part of our shared distancing solicitude, however, can be linked to the centuries of religious teaching, whereby death has been considered the gateway either to an eternal life of streets paved in gold in heaven, or a fiery pit in hell for those whose lives ‘warrant’ such a sentence to eternity, or for those less venal, a place in somewhere called purgatory, where those still needing purification to enter heaven’s glory are assigned.

And, as there is no human path to convincing evidence of the existence or non-existence of any of these ‘places’ there is also no way to escape their emotional, spiritual, psychological and even physical impact on our lives. At the intersection of religious faith, imagination, belief and temporality, we stop breathing. At that intersection, people of all faiths attempt to link the event and the person to the eternal, to eternity, to the deity and to immortality. We share a common heritage in our desire for, our imaginative attempts to render, and our shaping of our lives to enter some form of eternal ‘afterlife’ of reward….or not.

The concept of a ‘judgement’ at the end of human life is one that continues to pervade much of western consciousness. And it is this over-hanging cloud that also continues to pervade our collective consciousness about both how we live our life and how and where we might spend eternity.

Tidal waves of ink, and acres of parchment/paper/walls of tombs have been dedicated to the exploration of what it means to die. At the core of these deliberations, regardless of the faith community in which they have been pursued lies the basic concept that humans are somehow tarnished, not-good, evil, and in Christian terms, ‘have come short of the glory of God’….as if that were ever in contention.

In my own experience, I found a discussion about the possibility that Hitler might have found a place in heaven, a discussion among first-year seminary candidates, exhilarating, somewhat frustrating and unforgettable. In our spiritual journey, various faiths have declared steps to exorcise demons, to confess our sins, and/or to grow and develop from the pain of those sins. (Recall Martin Buber’s consideration of sin to be the yeast on which humans thrived and developed.)

We have all heard those funeral homilies in which the statement ‘this person will be living in heavenly eternity as the side of God’….as attempted consolation for those grieving the loss. Personally, when conducting such funeral liturgies, I have never offered such a vision or statement, given that my theology places much less emphasis (almost none) on a day of judgement that any deity worthy of the name would perpetrate. Following that, it seems doubtful that any of us is capable of or justified in assessing the spiritual worth of any individual including ourselves. In the words of the vernacular, “that’s a job far above my pay grade’.

However, it is the intersection of the depth of pain, loss, suffering with the imagination of those writers in our holy books that we are left to contemplate. Poetic images, whether of beauty or disaster (think Dante’s Inferno) have impelled much art, even more prayer, even more liturgy, and even more imposition of the judgement of humans upon other humans in the name of ‘God’…whatever God was being postulated.

Deferring from judgement when in the process of grieving the loss of another, friend or foe, might be a process that could/would?  alleviate some of the deep grief and loss and ensuing depression that often follow the loss of a loved one. Nevertheless, this grief and the pain it brings is also an authentic component of human existence, and need not be relegated to a mental illness, as some in the psychiatric community have deemed it to be.

Humans, at least in North America, tend to take great notice of a new baby, a new life, the promise of whatever visions of achievement, success, respect and dignity that tend to exceed those already attained by most parents. We pay intense attention to those first few months of the child’s growth and development. In many cases, a similar pattern accompanies the last few months of our lives, especially if a serious illness has already foreshadowed life’s end. Perhaps, in our imaginations and in our spirits, we still see the beginning and the ending of life as somehow sacred, whereas, at least from the surface appearances, we consider many of the intervening months and years to be ones of struggle, conflict, turbulence, and discomfort. The Victorians were renowned for their pessimism, and it was Thomas Hardy who wrote in “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” ‘happinesss is a brief relief in the general drama of pain’.

We have, collectively, done much to remove many of the pain stimuli in our fixation on both drugs and technology to make human existence “easier’ and more ‘comfortable’ and more gentile and more sophisticated.

In spite of all of our efforts in this direction, of alleviating pain (physical and emotional) there does seem to be considerable evidence that perhaps many of our discoveries, designs, formulae and devices have left many boiling cauldrons of really serious and debilitating disease.

I would modestly wish that some of those intense initiatives at the beginning and at the end of human lives could be stretched into the middle years when most of us really need some different kinds of support, and yet, many are left to struggle and to wander and to flounder in isolation, alienation, solitude and the inevitable desperation.

My friend Roy undoubtedly did not suffer from a dearth of support, given his loving family. Likely his last weeks and months were as comfortable as was humanly and lovingly feasible. And for that, we are thankful as we also all hope to be afforded a similar support network. The significant developments in palliative care have enhanced the lives and time of those in the last stages of life, and for that our culture can be grateful and humbled. Those who work in this field, unheralded, making very few public utterances, themselves intimately familiar with the variety of the exigencies that face life’s termination, offer a service that is greatly needed, not only for those suffering, but also for those families trying to contend with the inevitable. Palliative care needs and deserves public support, in and through the provision of resources physical, emotional psychological and spiritual.

Whatever might be our personal theological orientation to an afterlife, we nevertheless cannot escape the overwhelming and immense complexity, profundity and mystery of our own leaving ‘this orb’. And, without indulging in monumental self-pity, nor deferring to cold and icy stoicism, we reflect on the lives of men like Roy, whose faces, smiles, words, jests, and wit graced a portion of our path, and in the process, come to an appreciation of other lives who, in their own way, also graced our path in ways for which we never expressed thanks. Perhaps we never even considered their impact on our lives, until after they have departed.

That is a sad loss, to which these words and these pages are pledged to resist.

It is not only people like Oprah who inspire a spirit of gratitude for our opportunities, and our blessings. And no matter whatever the names, we all have a list of those for whom we are grateful, and our tragedy is that we never told them how much they meant, while they were with us.

A forty-year-old husband, upon learning of the death of his thirty-eight-year-old wife to breast cancer, came to me on the top floor of the Centennary Hospital in Scarborough, in the summer of 1988, nearly in tears, to face the fact that he had not told his beloved wife “good-bye”. Imagine the pain he will and has suffered in the intervening years!

Thanks for being who you were and still are, Roy!