I had drunk so deeply of grief and innocently gambled so hard with fate and irony that a special kind of vision was gathering in my eyes, not entirely clear just yet. This was the same look people saw in your eyes when you have died for beauty and come to live accepting nature as life with no promise of paradise, and mad at people who couldn’t see that. ― Secrets of the Talking Jaguar
In positing this question, one wrung through with endings — mine, of course — I’m inviting you to consider the corollary of being breathed into and claimed by life. Namely, where does death or death language feature, if at all, when we talk about our life?
Put it another way, why is it we’re obsessed with living up to our potential, being all we can be and high-fiving our inalienable right to be fully human, without so much as a whisper of our death?
I’m not saying we don’t think about our demise but having hung out at so many events and gatherings (I’ll exclude for now Nights of Grief and Mystery), I’m yet to be convinced that, as a culture, we realise: a) we’re on the receiving end of life; and b) death is part of the deal we’ve struck in being able to recognise, appreciate and love the natural world, our family, friends and loved ones, and absent her presence, qua a deity, then it seems to me that we’re living in an almost Icarus-style way — i.e. the higher we fly, the more parlous our psychological and metaphysical position.
You might think the foregoing a load of New-Age psycho-babble, replete with my ego-driven tendencies — what do I really know? — but I’m not persuaded by much these days save that without an ingestion of a different cultural narrative that includes and is suffused with death language, we’re simply bypassing the deep-seated need to be human — i.e. fully alive spiritually and emotionally.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying we never talk about death but it’s always or nearly always in the context of someone else. Why is that? Well, I think it has something to do with the fact that there’s so much word voodoo associated with the D word.
Of course, this prismatic way of seeing the world, which very few people I know share or even acknowledge, isn’t supposed to do anything, and, certainly, isn’t in the bracket of the Stoics and their aphorisms which get trotted out with such aplomb — as if they had it, i.e. death, sorted and we don’t.
Let me put it like this. The way we’re drawn up now into the medical system, on an almost industrial scale, has removed us from the natural world like so many other things that others have called the age of separation. Imagine if it were otherwise. What, pain on an almost unimaginable scale? I doubt it but when do we say enough is enough? When do we take control of our endings without passing the baton over to the medical profession to decide our fate?
I realise what I’m advocating for is heretical (it’s in the same bracket I guess as physician-assisted suicide) but I remain deeply under-persuaded that the technology that surrounds our death hasn’t created a sort of naiveté around what we should be doing when it comes to reckoning with our endings or the end of our days.
To be honest, I’m not sure anyone or anyone I know will take what I say to heart or even hold up their cherished beliefs about a good life et al. but all I know is that our death anxiety is one of the reasons why we live our lives chasing after the chimera of happiness and success. Imagine if it were otherwise. Imagine a world where we didn’t have such deep faith in our capabilities but instead looked at our depth of frailties and misgivings as a hallmark of someone we might look on as an elder and not as someone who had fallen into a narcissistic or nihilistic state.
Anyhow, tis Friday. Thank god for that.
Enjoy your day.
Photo by Rosie Sun on Unsplash