Death’s bad reputation (see 5 June blog) as an obscene, scandalous social disease is one form of denial. Death is made into such a dreadful specter it is unacceptable, not as manner of speaking, but actually: as in “I won’t accept it.” (This works better when you are at an age where one’s own death is still mostly an abstract issue.)
But even if we move in the direction of seeing death as a normal and natural (those friendlier adjectives), even if death is made more socially acceptable (as it were), it remains, this common fate of ours, if not dreadful, nevertheless alien to us.
If not reconfigured—denied—as some sort of friendly afterlife, death would seem to be simply ungraspable.
“ I cant believe this is really happening,” said my wife recently, sitting five feet from my sister with terminal cancer, to whom, although very much still there, mostly intact—herself— sitting in a chair in front of us, it did in fact happen only a couple of days later.
There is grieving for the loss (her loss of the life she would otherwise have had; our loss, the absence which is the presence of the hole that will never be filled because there will only be one such person). And then, perhaps more profoundly or at least more unexpectedly, there is simply shaking your head at the unbelievability and strangeness of it all, of the ending of her life. Of life.
“Strange,” meaning “I can’t come to terms with it. Here today and…gone tomorrow? How can that be?” We all know that it can be. And will be. Yet how can it be? It’s like Harry Potter donning his cloak of invisibility or Bilbo the ring, except they only seem to disappear.
But is it not strange that can we find strange this most common fact of life? No. For one thing, it’s not a fact of life. Its a fact beyond life.
Though our bodies will be transformed by death, frustratingly our minds cannot follow, cannot get to it. Get it. Life stops short of death, cannot comprehend it, grasp it. We can’t get there from here (although we all get there from here).
Being, the first part of the famous dichotomy, can’t grok nothingness.
As life, we living seem to lack receptors for life’s opposite number.
That seems to be about as far as we can go with it. It’s the one mystery we have the hardest time with, this simple fact that life by its nature is of limited duration. As water is wet, pumpkins orange.
It’s not—or not just— that we construct various forms of denial of death such as a belief in an afterlife. Life itself seems constituted as a state of denial, and a good thing, too.
To be continued.
[Note: this is a version of a chapter in a book- in- progress called Learning to Die, which may be serialized here from time to time. The first in this series was posted on 5 June 2015. ]
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