A matter of life and death

The Katha Upanishad poses a question: what is it that everybody knows but nobody believes? Answer: that you are going to die.

Whether we like it or not, sooner or later we have to think about death. In the four years since I retired, there have been six deaths of people of my generation in my circle of friends and family. All due to natural causes. That’s a death rate of 1.5/year, not counting an impending seventh, a friend who has recently been told he probably doesn’t have long to go. The rate during my working life was around 0.1/year, pretty steady even if you break it down by decade.

A 15 fold jump. That gets your attention. What is the correct response? A close relative lost a sister in her 70s, and was so shocked and traumatised that she did not go to the funeral or ever talk about it. It was like it never happened. Another person was so scared her husband would die that she lived in constant fear and depression for the last few years of his life. And then he died, driving her even nuttier. Death can throw anyone for a loop. Even the clear eyed Joan Didion slid out of reality when her husband died - read her excellent monologue 'A year of magical thinking'.

Can we, should we, come to terms with death? Does it make sense to even think about it? Can we come to regard our death or the death of our loved ones with equanimity?

Nobody understands death, yet everybody knows enough to be scared. The most incomprehensible part of life, scary because we don’t know what lies beyond. The loss is horrific when it takes away someone really close like a spouse or a child, chilling, ultimate loss. If it’s sudden, the irretrievable finality of it can be bewildering and disorienting. There is the physical aspect of dying, but that really isn’t the issue. We would all prefer it to be quick and relatively painless, but even any other way the physical aspect is actually not so frightening, especially if we are clear what we define as our terms for living, strike our own balance between quantity and quality. The real issue with death isn’t physical, it’s emotional and beyond, metaphysical.

Being exposed to death at close quarters in our formative years doesn’t help build resilience either - it can in fact go the other way. I lost my father when I was 15, and it quietly numbed me at depths of emotion that I wasn’t even aware of. I was unable to talk about it until 25 years later. It abruptly altered my life and my life view. I became fatalistic, regarding all things and relationships as transient, a sort of reflexive yet destructive recoil meant to protect me from future loss. I plunged deep into philosophy and metaphysics, moving on to a spiritual search to determine the truth about God and death, in the process losing whatever little faith I had, or more to the point, realising I didn’t really have any.

Having been spurred by the rising drumbeat of deaths to revisit the issue once again at this stage of life, I have come to realise that paradoxically, coming to terms with death really has more to do with living than with death. The two examples I gave earlier illustrate two dud options of dealing with death, because both focus just on death. First option, it can be ignored, with the intention of facing it when necessary. That's feckless, it just means risking being thoroughly unprepared and unable to cope properly in a healthy fashion. As I was, as I did. Second option, just succumb to dread of it. Destructive, as fear of death will cast a brooding, unsettling shadow over life.

Which brings us to the third option. Which is to actually regard death as liberating. Liberating, because in comparison to death nothing really matters. To that extent thinking about it and coming to terms with it can be valuable, can actually improve the quality of life, if done wisely. This is nothing nothing new and revolutionary, it’s been said many times before. There is even the catchy pop version that says 'Live every day as though it were your last'. Well, that's a little cute and really doesn’t work, or all our days might look the same (probably involving the same people who will pretty soon turn around and advise you to forget about death and get a life), and even any other way the concept would lose novelty and bite soon. This liberation is just something we have to discover for ourselves. Like love. Once you 'get' this, and it goes in deep, the journey begins.

Liberation from what? Liberation from the attitudes and stances we are forced into by circumstances in life, that compromise who we really are. Knowing at the very depth of our consciousness that we are going to die, that nothing is really crucial and everything is transient can help gradually thaw out the frozen rigidities of learned behaviour, help loosen things up. Slowly, meditatively, over time it is possible to start to make choices of behaviours, attitudes, activities, and people, distancing ourselves from those we are not comfortable with, getting closer to those we like, forming a new equilibrium and becoming more comfortable with our lives and ourselves. Relationships are central to life - family, friends, colleagues, all swirl differently at different stages of life. People change, yet our relationships remain hostage to earlier impressions and dynamics. I have learnt that it is possible to reset relationships, thoughtfully, individually, with updated versions of oneself and others. The relationship can go either way as a result ... it can improve, or one can realise it's time to distance oneself. Both have happened to me, and both are a step forward. To get this in perspective, think of what your relationship to people will be in a possible afterlife...your servant, your boss, the prime minister, the beggar on the street. What will survive death, what will dissolve, what will emerge?

All this makes sense and can be done anytime, but is easiest in retirement. It’s the final lap of life when, as has happened to me, death starts to play a major hand. Compulsions arising from building our lives and our careers are absent yet we cling to old attitudes in a Pavlovian fashion. We can start to soften the 'musts' of our lives - must do, must be, must have... will it matter if we havent lived up to our musts, once we are dead? Recognise that the 'shoulds' we impose on the world are not going to change it, are part of a defective coping mechanism, are not going to outlive us, are just going to make us unhappy and uncomfortable.

With the liberating consciousness of death we can start to move in directions where our spirit and the winds of circumstance intersect. Maybe death is the secret catalyst for life, a natural way of keeping us honest about life, a plausible way of creating positive change in ourselves and our lives - otherwise a nearly impossible task. Consciousness of death is not necessarily the starting point or the only driving force for these changes, one could already be working on some of these in different ways, but it is the vector that focuses all other efforts, enhances them, makes them work.

This approach also works in a more subtle manner. While the focus is on the attitude to living, the attitude to death also changes, bringing us back full circle. The issue of death is now out in the open, no longer ignored, no longer hidden in the dark; over time fear reduces, yielding to some measure of equanimity. Also, the 'reset' of attitudes and relationships helps release regret, a big win and a fundamental need in dealing with one's own life - and death. Just don’t expect miracles, it’s all very slow, but you can feel it happening, slow, but faster and better than before.

This can sound a lot like a headlong plunge into existentialism, but it need not be. Existentialism springs from living with the knowledge that you are going to die, period. It can lead to unmitigated selfishness, as it views the here and now as all that exists. That's limiting. Dealing with both life and death has to be part of a larger, a more transcendent view of life as part of a bigger reality. I have found that spirituality and death consciousness work in harmony in dealing with life's traps. If one has some sense of the continuity of one's soul, some sense of karma, then selfishness is no longer a viable option. For selfish actions will come back to exact a price later in this life or after. If we keep that in mind, our world view will become more inclusive, more connected to others. Even current psychology and neuroscience accept that doing good for others makes us feel better. Selfishness isolates us emotionally and spiritually, making life more arid.

A belief system that doesn’t see death as a finality can also help in contemplating the death of a loved one....seeing it as a change of phase, like water evaporating. The person won't cease to exist, there will just be a change in form and dimension.

And finally faith, if you have it, provides a safe haven when coping with acts of God.

As someone said: everyone dies, but not everyone lives. Death can help with living.