Dying people get the best of our pain and symptom technology and they tend to lose their old fear of pain. They get the best of our palliative chemotherapy and radiation and they have More Time to die in. Their families plead for the palliative medicine system to do something and it does, and those families live months and years in the inarticulate, insubstantial purgatory of not knowing any longer how to have a dying person in their midst, with little good guidance on how to do so. — Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
The glib, all-to-easy answer is to say when we’re born.
Perhaps, then, I need to reframe the question and ask: when do we countenance death as the cradle of (our) life?
If my experience is anything to go by, the answer hovers between never and only at the very end of our earthbound days.
What if it were different?
What if we sat with death and accepted her presence instead of opting for the righteous entitlement of living up to our potential?
You might think that to embrace death would summon us to do more with our life. To max out if you will. But how would that acknowledge let alone pay homage to death?
If anything we’d end up on a treadmill of distraction to ameliorate or distance ourselves from the subject either in material form or otherwise.
I understand that death is riddled with contradiction but it’s a subject that we shun at our peril.
How do I know that?
Well, arguably, it’s at least one of if not the main reasons for our current, anthropocentric-driven predicament.
Put it like this. Who the hell wants to hasten their demise by dint of their habits, behaviours and predilection to consume?
Nature on the hand is, well, natural or naturally occurring and I can’t imagine a bird, squirrel or hedgehog deliberately exploiting its locus for the sake of comfort, whatever the cost — the sine qua non of being human.
In the end (oh dear god I’ve said those words too many times) it hardly matters if we lean into death and acknowledge her presence. We’ll go the way of our ancestors but I can’t help feel that part of the loss we feel and the (often) work-induced depression isn’t a reflection of our avoidance of endings and especially death.
For now, though, all I’ll say is that if you knew you only had a grace period of a few months, would it change you and those closest to you?
I hope so.
I really do.
Much love, Julian
Photo by Nadia Cortellesi on Unsplash