THE NOT SO HIDDEN UNDERLYING THING - DEATH

In an earlier piece I talked about shame and how it can go straight to our being since it is not about anything we did, about our behavior. Shame is about who we are and is therefore something difficult to defend against. I am reluctant to bring it up, but another thing we have little defense against is death.

Underlying so much of the last two plus years indeed is unconscious and conscious reactions to death – the deaths of people around us and our own death. The expression “I feel it down to my bones,” captures much of this. And, like shame, this implies that our reactions to death go immediately deeper than muscles.

Discussed in meticulous detail in Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death” as central to our culture and lives, it has become a virtual necessity for all of us to take some time to consider our thoughts and feelings about death.

I am speaking about this especially because my mother-in-law, Cherry Thomas Harper, has just passed away today, March 21st.  My wife, Julie’s been with her in her home virtually non-stop for weeks and I have been spending hours there as well each day. May she rest in peace - Cherry Harper! 

The contemplation of death brings us, me certainly, into a place I don’t often reside in. A not-knowing and sometimes a futile feeling-array of emotions: anger, sadness, fear, grief, love, etc.. I have been uncomfortable with this experience until today – when I realized it was a necessary experience, and stopped insisting internally that I wasn’t doing this “right.”

There is no “right” here. There is just the complexity of experience and the activating of care for oneself and others, and nonetheless a sense of futility – what to do? Is life itself futile? Is death such a big deal, since it happens to all living things? Is the state of the world which seems to be intent on nonetheless suiciding itself something I can be in any way at peace with?

That I can ask and feel the implications of these questions is a sign of life.  We all live, like it or not, with this feeling and knowledge in our very bones that our life will end. Of course, we hope that this will enhance the preciousness and meaningfulness of our current life and that of all others. It is up to each of us to, if not make peace, at least to establish as healthy a relation as possible to death and to life.

I’m working on it, as is my family at this critical time. This is a peace and a disturbance, both of which surpasseth all understanding.

Four musical pieces occurred to me this morning:

The song by Bob Dylan – Death is Not the End - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4jHDvNB80

A Trio by Franz Schubert , No. 2, Op. 100, “Andante Con Moto”– one of the last pieces written before he died at the age of 31. Despite his short lifetime, Schubert left behind more than 600 secular vocal works, 7 complete symphonies, sacred music, operas,  and a large body of piano and chamber music

And Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament” which my mother listened to over and over before she died – here is Annie Lennox making it real in today’s world. But my mom also listened over and over to this famous tune from Zorba the Greek - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS0w3Wkric8

Dear Friends, please enjoy this permission to consider the time you have left, the passage of time through death and into new continuations of this tree of life.