Death has a very bad reputation in our culture. That sounds like a black humor joke since its badness seems not a matter of reputation at all but inherent in the phenomenon.
But to a significant extent, death, or our experience of it, is indeed a social disease: how it is characterized is a large part of its problem. A PR problem, you might say. Death is an obscenity, an insult to life, inherently unacceptable (though we all have to accept it). Alien (though as familiar as that other certainty, taxes).
Death is a scandal. People used to die of old age; now death is a disease to be cured. (Scientists are working away on it. All we have to do is cure the diseases of aging—a few cancers, heart disease, etc—and voila: immortality.) And if not cured, denied, most commonly by the idea of an afterlife. Life goes on, it’s just different, usually much better.(“He’s in a better place.”). “Death be not proud,” chastises John Donne in the famous poem,”One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
That’s the most popular way to fend off the idea of death, to deny its defining characteristic, its (sheer, breathtaking, here-today-gone-tomorrow) finality.
Even Elisabeth Kubler Ross, famous for making death and dying a less taboo subject: “The dying patient has to pass through many stages in his struggle to come to grips with his illness and his ultimate death…..Sooner or later he will have to face the grim reality” (Questions and Answers on Death and Dying). Grim. Grim reaper. As if the grimness were built into the phenomenon, like the orange of a pumpkin or the wetness of water.
Does it have to be that way?
In How We Die, Sherwin Nuland, MD tries to defuse some of this rhetoric of denial. Dying, as he explains it, is, at least when it comes at the statistically normal stage of life, not something external or alien to us, but part of the trajectory of one’s own body. It is not an affront or terrible mistake, not a disease or a failure of medical science to cure a disease. It is not absurd or obscene, challenging the meaning of life. Not tragic. Not the opposite of life or, though it ends it, or even a threat to it, but how life works, the way life happens. Natural. And there should be comfort in that.
Dying is to life as the edge of the canvas is to a painting: crucial to its meaning.
[ Note: this is a version of a chapter in a book- in- progress called LEARNING TO DIE, which may (or may not) be serialized here from time to time ]
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