Socrates referred to it as either a "dreamless sleep" or a "relocating of the soul..." Hamlet called it the "undiscover'd country from whose bourn / No traveller returns..."
They were speaking, as many readers know, of death. And despite some modern accounts (see, for example, Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven), Hamlet was right: the trip into our end is one-way.
In his 1998 encyclical "Fides et Ratio" ("Faith and Reason"), John Paul II wrote that "the first absolutely certain truth of our life, beyond the fact that we exist, is the inevitability of our death." Despite this daunting fact, death is rarely mentioned or discussed; or if it is, it's done so in passing or indirectly. We rarely focus on death as its own philosophical or literary theme. We know death will deliver itself, but we don't necessarily want to acknowledge it. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus captured it well many years ago when he wrote:
We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word “good” should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.
These great authors and their thoughts returned to mind recently when I read about the expansion of what one might call "death studies." Last week, TheWall Street Journal reported:
At Kean University, students are dying (as it were) to get into Norma Bowe's class "Death in Perspective," which has sometimes carried a three-year waiting list. On one field trip to a local coroner's office, Dr. Bowe's students were shown three naked cadavers on metal tables. One person had died from a gunshot, the other from suicide and the third by drowning.The last corpse appeared overweight but wasn't; he had expanded like a water balloon. A suspect in a hit-and-run case, he had fled the scene, been chased by police, abandoned his car and jumped into the Passaic River. On the autopsy table, he looked surprised, his mouth splayed open, as if he realized he had made a mistake. As the class clustered around, a technician began to carve his torso open. Some students gagged or scurried out, unable to stand the sight or the smell.
This grim visit was just one of the excursions for Dr. Bowe's class. Every semester, students also leave the campus in Union, New Jersey, to visit a cemetery, a maximum-security prison (to meet murderers), a hospice, a crematory and a funeral home, where they pick out caskets for themselves. The homework is also unusual: Students are required to write goodbye letters to dead loved ones and to compose their own eulogies and wills.
That's not all. The article further notes:
Today, growing numbers of Americans are confronting death as something more than an abstract possibility. So-called death dinners, in which people gather to talk about the inevitable, are increasingly popular; so are death salons, featuring discussions of death over craft beer. Death cafes, events whose dark talk is perked up by tea and cake, have sprouted up in more than 100 cities, according to Lizzy Miles, who hosted the first known one in the U.S. in July 2012 in Westerville, Ohio.
I know some will find all the death talk unsettling, but I think this trend is a generally healthy direction for our academic and popular culture, for a culture that struggles to fathom wrinkled skin and receding hair lines. It can certainly be overwrought, it can certainly become woefully depressive or despair-inducing; but if contemplating the curtain call of our earthly run inspires people to reflect more intentionally and thoughtfully about their lives, about their decision-making, and about what they value and how they behave, about the origin and end of all their days, then these courses, cafes and events can be much-needed correctives.
Beth -
Thank you for your honesty, for opening the door into sufferings and contemplations that very few can or will understand. Reading your post, I feel an urge to pray, to listen, to wonder, and to be silent.
Someone close to my family died seven years ago of metastatic breast cancer, and she said something similar to what you wrote. I asked her what it was like to be confronting her death in such a manner, and she said that the experience, in its ineffable character, was like having a child. You couldn't understand it, she said, until you actually go through it yourself. I realized then there was a gulf that had opened up, a space between us, and that for all my efforts to understand and sympathize, I simply wouldn't fathom what she was feeling.
I'm intrigued by the questions that you face and which you posed in your comment: "This is happening to me, how am I going to respond? With fear, with trust, with hope, with joy, with denial, with depression? Where does such trust and hope come from? Can it be conjured up at will? Can I really decide how I will die, or is that just another form of control?"
If you don't mind my asking, are you able to answer those questions with any kind of particularity? Can you share anything with readers?
I'm sure you hear this a lot, so I hope it doesn't come across trite, but I will be praying for you and hoping for healing and consolation.
Sincerely,
Matt E.
Beth,
Thank you for your response. There are lines that will remain with me and that I will unpack for a long long time... "I am getting more and more sure that I should not judge what I am feeling" . . . "Hope is much deeper than certainty" . . . "When you go along in life thinking that it's going to go on forever, as most of us do for a lot of years, you're pretty much mostly sleep walking."
That last line especially struck me. I don't want to sleep walk through life. I want to feel its urgency, its contingency, also its joy and possibility. What is your advice? How does one "wake up"? Is that even possible without having to face a serious illness or grief?
Matt
Bruce --
I read the article differently than you did. I thought that Kean Univ and Norma Bowe were trying to address the very worry you identify -- i.e., death being taken too lightly. It seems that the assignments the students have are the kinds of assignments that would get them to realize that time is fleeting, life is fragile, and that we must savor the gift of our existence. If the course brings in no religious perspectives, I think those should be added, but even without those, I would think students walk away far more grateful and aware than before the course. It seems, from everything I've read, the professor has very good intentions.
Professor Bowe is a counselor at the Center for Grief Services in NJ. At that web site, she writes this on her blog:
"The only thing we can change is our attitude about death. We can learn about it. We can plan for it. We can talk to our loved ones about it. We can live our lives the way they should be lived. All of this takes inordinate amounts of courage because death is scary. Living takes courage too. If we can respect death as inevitable, instead of ignoring it for as long as we can before the health problems set in, we can live with a renewed sense of passion and wonder. The world around us can be a truly amazing place. The knowledge of our own mortality can even be the fire in our belly that pushes us to our maximum potential. Life is grand if we know we are dying."
I think those words show a deep appreciation for what's at stake with life and death, even if she wouldn't share the theological presuppositions of Catholic Christianity. From my own brief research, it seems that Prof. Bowe, with this class, very much wants to cultivate a wisdom that transcends surface-level thinking.
-Matt
Beth, can you expound on what you mean here -- "we're mostly interpreting it all wrong and spreading this wrong interpretation as a form of delusional comfort."
What do you mean? I'm very curious.
I think of the "personal struggle" you mentioned and my thoughts turn Jacob's wrestling with the angel and to the subsequent renaming from Jacob to "Israel," or "one who contends with the divine." Perhaps there's part of the originality and wisdom of the Old Testament, that it began to see that faith and some kind of wrestling or an internal-working-out are not incompatible.
This might be a reach here, but the way you describe your experience makes me think of what we read about in the Passion Narrative. There is no contrived cheerfulness or exhortations that all will end well. There is a brutal acknowledgment of the cruelty of the world and the fear and trembling it evokes. "My soul is very sorrowful, even to death . . ." (Mk 14:34).
Related to all this... reading the comments on this post, I'm put in mind of a passage from Christian Wiman's recent memoir of faith, My Bright Abyss. Composed as he was ravaged by disease, he writes: