which culture is correct, or an isolation that simply ignores everything outside of its own beliefs and structures. There is yet a third response, and it is the response I believe we have struck on in our post-modern American society. This third response is to develop an overarching culture that trumps the lesser cultures and beliefs. We build a secret culture that we all really hold to; while still giving allegiance to our own one true culture.
We build a different tower of belief. This one we build with all of the other surrounding cultures. Then we can call that tower the BEST and we will still all be right by proximity and connection.
Now you get a hint of why people do not talk about death in a digital age. It is connected to our whole worldview and the stability or collapse of that worldview.
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Out of Ernest Becker’s theories developed a following. One particular approach to the issues that Becker analyzed comes from TMT or Terror Management Theory. This theory holds that our death anxiety causes enough of a cognitive dissonance in us that—as societies and as individuals—we build up buffers to the fear. In society we call these buffers cultures: religions, beliefs, groupings, clubs and the like. In individuals we call this buffer a sense of self-esteem or self worth.
In either category (societal or individual) we interpret people and groups that are contrary to our culture and our self-esteem as a threat to our stability. We tend to believe things that are different from us are wrong so we can bolster our own belief. “This is good; that is bad,” is clearly one way we express this threat.
This theory is clearly worth looking into as the social scientists involved are highly credible individuals and have wonderful empirical findings to back up the theories. People fear death. Varying levels of that fear change who we are as individuals and as a people.
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This will not be a linear discussion about death. This will be an amble, a wander, and a dance through, in and around all of the transformations in our life that we have shied away from. We will dance with death, we will dance with changes. Don’t expect anything usual. Dance with me among the life that happens around the great transformation in dying into what comes next. Live with me for a while 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.
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It may actually be Death Himself that stalks us at every turn.
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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
