I once joked that “I want to die in my
sleep like my father, not screaming like the rest of the passengers in the car.” But death is an ambush—a nasty deal. It is never fair and there are always loose
ends. There aren’t always times to say good by. We are all
looking into our grave. As Ryan White,
the teenager who died of AIDs, said, “We are all
dying.” In a movie, two honeymooners
are standing at the rail of an ocean liner.
“If I were to die tomorrow, the young women says
to her husband, “I would feel that my life had been full because I have known
your love.” They kiss and then move away
revealing the name of the ship on the life preserver: Titanic
At present
“Ray said that Pat O’Mallery,
a fellow worker at the screw company, was dead.
Someone from the company went to Pat’s apartment to investigate. He found him slumped over dead, from a heart
attack, work clothes still on, his body black with decomposition.
“The rescue team found the girl and she
was pulled up with a hook. They were
playing around the water and Gail unintentionally kicked Mary by accident. The police report said this caused her to go
unconscious and sink to the bottom of the lake and rest in the mud.”
The question is whether death is
extinction and annihilation of all that I am.
Is death a pilgrimage or a destination? “Now I am about to take my last
voyage—a great leap in the dark,” said the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. What will happen to you die? Nothing, the materialist says. What will it matter if famine unchain their
wrath again you, while you lie comfortable in your grave consumed by honest
worms, neither dreaming nor snoring. No
regrets will linger in your tomb to mingle with the larvae that batten your
melting flesh.
For the Christian, it is the death of the
soul, not physical death that is our enemy.
“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful,
for thou are not so.” John Donne wrote.
“On short sleep past, we wake eternally/And
death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!” To pass from life to death is not such a
terrible thing. The experiment has been
made countless times. We are all aware
of the transitional nature of life and fame, that the seasons of life pass us
by as relentlessly as autumn to winter.
Death, for all its ugliness, gives
nobility and poignancy to life. When I
look at a gravestone or a coffin, I sometimes think that “Therefore but for the
grace of God, goes a better man than I.”
Death bids us to slow down and wake up.
A cabdriver pointed out to me it was a beautiful day, and indeed it
was. I just hadn’t noticed it. I complain when it’s too hot or too cold, and
don’t notice it when everything is perfect. For all of us, someday the electroencelogram’s sine will flatten. As the Tibetan author Sogyal
Rinpoche says, “If you’re having problems with a
friend, pretend he’s dying—you may even love him.” The columnist Joseph Sobran
wrote that “When I consider that I am going to die someday, a thought that
occurs to me more often now, I feel a sad affection for people who otherwise
irritate me. I begin to appreciate them
and to think of what I have in common with them. Sharp differences soften. Maybe we should begin our farewells a little
earlier than we usually do.” H.L. Mencken, was perhaps unwittingly pious when he noted that
“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have a thought to please
my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”
Grief has many masks. Pain, laughter, numbness,
nausea. The mind reels. Body and soul collapses as real and unreal
worlds clash in collision. As Lear says on seeing Cordelia’s
body: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat
have life and thou no breath at all?” In
the extremity of human despair (“Thou’ll come no
more”) he utters his towering fivefold “never, never, never, never,
never!” When I have felt sad, I have
taken solace the familiar prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi: “O Divine master, grant that we may not so
much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand, to
be loved as to love. For it is in giving
that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying
that we are born to eternal life.”