I’ve been really fascinated by death lately, but my greatest fear for many years, like a great deal of other people, I imagine, had always been death. I just couldn’t handle thinking about it. Everything would stop. I'd become momentarily paralyzed. It was a horrifying feeling, yet at the same time gratifying to know that my life was full enough that I should be dismayed by the idea of it ending. In contemplating the terrible notion of my beloveds dying, I could feel how this fear actually pointed to the the deep love I held for them.
Something has shifted in me in the last couple years, though. A subtle, slow change. I can now contemplate my own death, and with much less anxiety. This is partially because, as spirituality has become a bigger part of my life, I am now more open to the idea that death is not necessarily an ending. It’s still hard to imagine watching the people I love die, but it’s getting easier. However, I think it’s also because death has become a bigger part of my life. And just as in the way that bigoted people tend to dissolve their hateful views upon spending time with the people they had feared, I learn to engage more fully with the idea of death as it touches my life. I recently completed 6 months as an art therapy intern at a hospice. I spent time with people, mostly elderly, who had a palliative diagnosis. I also counselled the bereaved. I interned at a sleepaway camp for grieving children, which was one of the most beautiful and intense experiences of my life so far. From these experiences, I’ve learned so much about how to more honestly dialogue on the subject. I try now to say ‘died’, instead of ‘passed’. To just be real about the whole thing. I learned that closer proximity to death and grieving does seem to bring about a heightened experience of life, for me. These days, it’s been a very conscious choice to engage with ideas around death and mortality. I read ‘When Breath Becomes Air”, the memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who was diagnosed with fatal lung cancer in his mid thirties. Kalanithi contemplated what it means to live fully in the face of imminent death. I’m currently reading “Advice for Future Corpses” by Sally Tisdale, who is a palliative nurse, writer, and Buddhist. She provides practical advice on how to deal with death and dying, while also sprinkling in some Buddhist wisdom. I watched a documentary about a siblings in a family who decide to finally content with their brother’s suicide. It’s called ‘Evelyn’. What am I learning? That to confront death is to celebrate life. That to meditate on death is to more fully comprehend the anxiety that is the human condition. That life is so very fragile, and we are holding this in our bones all of the time. When I was 19 years old, I had just about the most intimate experience of death one can imagine. I won’t share most of the details here, but it was a death I witnessed and it was the passing of the very first man I ever loved. I don’t think I properly processed it at the time. I think that some ritual around it would have been a good idea. Extensive time with a therapist would have likely been tremendously helpful. However, I am now starting to realize that no matter what happened at that time, after the event I had the feeling, for a long time, that someday I would shed it. That there would be 100% healing around this event. And I’d move on. Oh honey, I now realize that is NOT how it works. I will carry this around with me always. The healing will be a lifelong process. This is called integration. The beauty and truth of who I am is incomplete without acknowledging every kernal of my experiences. I’m thinking about death being connected to the truth of existence and ephemerality. Everything is changing, dying...and at the same, contributing to regrowth. The cycles of nature. I’m thinking about death as part of a bigger project to sit with pain and suffering instead of running away and engaging in numbing behaviours. To approach the vast loneliness and confusion that being a self, being human can be sometimes. It’s also so bloody mysterious. I’m not sure anyone can really assert they know what happens (or doesn’t) after death. So...engaging with the mysterious, the painful, the confusing. And the vulnerable. I'm thinking about death. To see it squarely in order that I can fully live. With all the suffering, beauty, and awe that involves. Shaina Lehan On Hearing Of A Death We lack all knowledge of this parting. Death does not deal with us. We have no reason to show death admiration, love or hate; his mask of feigned tragic lament gives us a false impression. The world's stage is still filled with roles which we play. While we worry that our performances may not please, death also performs, although to no applause. But as you left us, there broke upon this stage a glimpse of reality, shown through the slight opening through which you disappeared: green, evergreen, bathed in sunlight, actual woods. We keep on playing, still anxious, our difficult roles declaiming, accompanied by matching gestures as required. But your presence so suddenly removed from our midst and from our play, at times overcomes us like a sense of that other reality: yours, that we are so overwhelmed and play our actual lives instead of the performance, forgetting altogether the applause. Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming
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February 2019
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