Facing Death Means Facing Life
There’s been a rash of articles in the press lately touting the benefits of the pandemic. Everyone is looking for silver linings. From more time to create outré holiday light extravaganzas to those who, for both economic and emotional reasons, have decided to make the time to create homemade gifts for their loved ones, we’re all looking for the good.
We shouldn’t be surprised at this. It’s what humans do.
What I think is fascinating is that we are, for the most part, avoiding the patently obvious gift in the ongoing pandemic. To date, 300,000 Americans will not be joining their families at holiday tables ever again. More than 1.6 million, worldwide, share that fate. Dr. Fauci is predicting that by spring, the American toll could be as high as half a million or more.
The elephantine gift in the room is death itself, Beloved.
Now before you squawk at me that I’m being heartless to all those who have lost a loved one, wait, hear me out. First let me tell you that I am no stranger to death, and I might even claim expertise in grief so familiar am I with death’s finality. But I am also intimate with death’s legacy, a legacy that is universal for all humans.
Death, Beloved, makes life crystal clear—if we’ll let it.
Americans aren’t very good at death. Even our words around it are namby-pamby. We say, passed on, transitioned, gone to a better place. Actually, the proper word here is died. Our fear of the word only reinforces our fear of the concept.
Because there’s no guarantee, despite any of our lifetime religiosities, of what exactly death is, it falls into the category of Unknown, and that means, de facto, scary as all hell, or heaven.
An essay in today’s New York Times by hospice and palliative care physician BJ Miller addresses these questions beautifully. She too doesn’t have all the answers, but she is asking the questions.
She writes, “Death is defined by what it lacks.” On a purely physical level, that’s true. The lacks are awareness, breath, circulation. When these stop, death enters, and life is no longer present. But for those of us who are left behind by the death of friend, foe, or family, what death can give us is clear, clean, uncomplicated messages about life.
As Dr. Miller rightfully says, “At your healthiest, living is a process of dying.” We’ve all heard the commonly-held mythos that we each create an entirely new body every seven years. It’s true.
But death is not strictly, or only, about bodies, is it? No. It’s about so many other things. Death is about what we did when we were alive, and what we didn’t when we were alive, and what we wished we had when we were alive. When we are blessed by a death in our lives, (yes, I do mean blessed) we have a chance, and a choice, to enhance our own life experiences. As Dr. Miller suggests, “Even if we can’t change what we’re looking at, we can change how we look at it.” Substitute death for it.
She asks repeatedly, “So, again, what is death? I would add that we might also ask the converse of her question. So, again, what is life? Oddly, I suspect that we have, at best, thoroughly inadequate answers to both questions.
“Talking about and around it may be the best we can do, and doing so out loud is finally welcome.” Is that a gift from coronavirus? Yes, I think so. Perhaps.
“Facts alone won’t get you there. We’re always left with the next biggest question, one that is answerable and more useful anyway: What is death to you? When do you know you’re done? What are you living for in the meantime?”
Ah. And now we get down to it. Death makes abundantly clear what we are (and are not) living for in the meantime. That in itself is a stellar gift if we’ll really ask the question and really answer it.
What are you living for in the meantime, Beloved?
In almost forty years of counseling people, you can imagine I’ve heard great litanies of woe and trouble. At the end of each one, I always ask the same question. “How would you like it to be instead of this?” In that same forty years, I’ve had two people be able to answer that immediately. Just two. Life isn’t very clear, is it? Not unless we do the work really to think about it.
David Brooks’ multi-year PBS television sparring partner, Mark Shields, is retiring. This Friday is their last broadcast together. In an homage to their delectable arguments over the years with, as he writes, “no acrimony,” one thing Mr. Brooks has learned from Mr. Shields is, “We have to do a little better at celebrating our successes.”
It’s true. Celebrating successes is life-affirming. We don’t do enough of it, Beloved. In fact, I’d suggest that celebrating successes is what principally keeps us going. But what has happened in this polarizing time is that success has become one thing, just as has life become one thing. Well, failure isn’t one thing, and neither is death, ergo, neither can success or life be one thing either.
All of them are plottable on a spectrum. All are process. It is these processes in which we must engage to construct lives that are fulfilling which, I am certain, is why we are here.
Dr. Miller again, “Beyond fear and isolation, maybe this is what the pandemic holds for us: the understanding that living in the face of death can set off a cascade of realization and appreciation.
“Death is the force that shows you what you love and urges you to revel in that love while the clock ticks. Reveling in love is one sure way to see through and beyond yourself to the wider world, where immortality lives.
“A pretty brilliant system, really, showing you who you are (limited) and all that you’re a part of (vast). As a connecting force, love makes a person much more resistant to obliteration.”
The New York Times is known for asking interesting questions. Here’s one: “Why Does Oreo Keep Releasing New Flavors?”
Justin Parnell is the senior director of the Oreo brand. “Novelty Oreos help drive consumers back to milk’s alleged favorite, the 108-year-old paterfamilias, the plain old Oreo. In other words, the new flavors function as advertisements for the original.”
Strangely, Beloved, death in our society functions much like novelty Oreos. We continue, by our avoidance of it, to rediscover death as a new flavor in life. When death touches our lives as it has, or does, or will inevitably, life, our same old same old, takes on a new sparkle.
Allow me to borrow from Poem 133: A Summer Day by the always-luscious Mary Oliver, “Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? / Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her essays address the intersection of spirituality and culture. Her website is susancorso.com.