Danse Macabre. N. Thomas Johnson-Medland
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among the things that happen around the dying.
I will share some tales that come right from the bedside of the dying. These things happened around me while I held hands with dying people. They happened as I worked with uncovering the layers and layers of meaning behind peoples’ fears and loves.
I will also share with you some of my own brushes with death. How has death impacted me? Where has he reared his head in my life? How have I gotten along amid that reality?
I will also drag out some tales from the ken of cultural development; things that cultures have said or expressed about death. How have artists have pictured death: painted it in word, canvas, or stone. I will also share a collection of poems about grieving, loss, and death.
Given that the world has become a single village (one that we are desperately trying to figure out) I would ask you to learn to suspend judgment and disbelief. Listen to the things that make us different. Do not simply brush away another persons beliefs or attempt at culture.
Remember, the one thing that we all are living toward and leaning into in this world—whether we are butcher, baker, candlestick maker, theologian, prostitute, congressman, or beggar—is that we are moving toward our death. Everything we do is somehow wrapped up, connected to, and impacted by that notion.
Wander with me, for a while if you will. You will never be the same. If any of these words that are gathered here can prod you into thinking about your own death and what you believe about it, and how that fits into other divergent belief, then I will have succeeded in what I had hoped to accomplish.
Chapter One
The idea of death stalks us at every turn.
* * *
It may actually be Death Himself that stalks us at every turn.
* * *
Whether it is the idea of death or Death Himself, it does not matter. We are stalked throughout our whole lives by the notion, the idea, the feeling, the reality, and the imminent haunting dream that we are going to “not be alive” someday. Someday, what we are now will either not be at all or will somehow be different—very different. We are stalked by this at every turn.
I used to think that this was just something that I knew because of my work in hospice and my presence in the Orthodox Church.
In hospice all of my patients and their families were so surrounded by the issues of death and dying that Death was palpable. In the Orthodox Church the Fathers of the Church are still taught, and one of the main spiritual prescriptions of the Fathers was and is to “remember your death”—it will help you to live more soberly.
But, as I have moved away from these two magnets of death, I have begun to realize that Becker (Ernest Becker and his associates) were and are correct. All of us are at some semblance of odds with the idea of death and Death Himself. Everything we do has some foretaste of our “some-day-not-doing” or “some-day-not-being” mixed up in it. We are obsessed with the reality that we will not be around some day. It lies just below the surface of everything we do. It is an anxiety that we keep with us, allowing it to taint—ever so minutely—everything we are and do.
If you do not believe that, then just tear apart your motives for a whole day. Dissect them down to the drivers behind each thing you do. At some point you will be left with the idea that you do the things you do because either you believe they will put you into heaven (or hell) or that you do the things you do because you want to be a part of a group of people that are associated with that kind of behavior (which is also a way of painting an image of “heaven or hell”—it is your version of people doing the right thing and you do not want to be separated or isolated from that group).
I know it is easy to recoil from this bold idea and statement. None of us wants to think of ourselves or humanity as lemmings headed to the cliff; making turns this way and that to avoid the final frontier that will come to be regardless. But, as has become clearly the motto for our age, “it is what it is”.
When we think about life, we think about belonging. We belong to a group or an ideal of what we think is the proper way. When we think about death, we think about being separated from our group or ideal—even if for an instant.
Death is that piece where we are “not-what-we-have-been”. People of faith and religious leaning will probably balk at what I am saying—at first blush. But, an honest man/woman will recognize that his/her faith is faith because they want to stay connected to God (or the Divine Ideal) and God’s community, even on the other side of the blinking instant of what we call death.
The reason the religious are religious is they do not want to be separated from this LIFE. They do not want to be separated from the TRUTH. Which is the premise that we are all doing what we do in life in response to the idea that we will not be alive some day.
* * *
This whole collection of words is about that idea. I am swimming in words about death and dying; about separation and belonging. This book is a wrestling with our wrestling with death. It is a suggestion to look at how you wrestle with your fear of “not-being” and see how it impacts the way you live. It is a call to actively working with your own beliefs and a request to acknowledge your mythologies of death and dying.
Bring it up out of the unconscious and make it conscious. Because, as the Gospel of Thomas, 70 states so clearly: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will kill you.”
Take a look at what is going on in yourself when you consider the idea of “not-being”. What does it make you do, believe, feel, intuit, and desire? Remember your death—as the Fathers taught. It drives who you are. Be aware of that.
* * *
This one morning, I could feel Death’s presence as I put on my socks. He was cold and heavy, sitting there without uttering a sound. He did not call to me, or draw a grasping hand at me. He just sat there. I could not even hear him breathe.
He lives on the back side of a fog we would do well to call ignorance. Sometimes we would do well to call the fog denial. Working with the dying has dissipated the fog some in my life. It is still there because so many people hide from the transformational ethos of dying, but I can see through it—like a haze—just a bit. The dying ones have made sure of that. They were eager to help me see.
* * *
It may not actually have been Death himself. It is hard to know if the presence you feel is Death or one of his minions (those that do His bidding). It is the same fine line between thinking about Death and thinking about dying. He and His minions have the same feel: cold and heavy, breathless. They are silent but clearly knowable. Talking about Death and dying has the same feel too. They are silencing. They bring an end to whatever is going on. Their lugubrious presence is heavy.
It felt like Death, though, this morning. Death sat there next to me on the bed. It sort of reminded me of the Looney Tunes cartoon when the sheep dog and the coyote go off to work together and punch in at the same time clock. Once they punch in, they become enemies, but before that they are just folks who know each other.
Death and I knew each other, but as I got closer to work—work at the hospice—He would become the very thing I was helping people to deal with. I would start to talk about Death like He was not there. He and I would be traveling together, but my job was to somehow open other peoples’ eyes to His presence in their life, so they could be “awake”.
* * *
You can tell when Death or His minions are in a room. You have been in a hospital room when nothing is being said, nothing is being felt. That not-saying and that not-feeling are because Death or His buddies are in the room—taking all of the life out of it. Death and his buddies consume everything—leaving a vacuous void. Silence beyond anything we could give word to.
If you are not sure of what I am talking about, just say the word “death” the next time you are talking with a group of people. Simply interject the