"My death, is it possible?"

Let's start here:

Pandemic or not, the death rate is still 100 percent. None of us is getting out of here alive, and yet only one-third of us have an end-of-life care plan in place. My perspective on talking about that changed after graduating from Duke Divinity School, when I completed a post-graduate residency year in hospital clinical pastoral education (aka chaplaincy) with an unintended specialization in end-of-life care. I stumbled into death, dying, and grief; several months later, my supervisor wrote that I’d taken to end-of-life care chaplaincy “as a morning glory takes to sunlight.” Caring for people in crisis—which even a peaceful, predicted death can be—is comfortable for me.

During those twelve months, I had the honor of sitting bedside with over 200 dying patients of all ages, races, socio-economic backgrounds, and theologies (or those who didn’t have one). They and their families generously shared a collective wisdom about death—and life—which it seemed a disservice not to honor.  

From  this experience,  J. Dana Trent learned this:

Death is humanity’s great equalizer. It’s the one, single universal thread that unites us. And yet, we find it impossible to talk about—even when the specter of death arrives on a global scale like what we’re experiencing with the Coronavirus. Across all religious, spiritual, indigenous, moral, ethical, and scientific inquiry—humans have, traditionally, attempted to understand and assign meaning to their unavoidable death.

But in the age of technology we believe ourselves to be invincible. Viral outbreak or not, many of our greatest thinkers are urging us to consider the incoming “Silver Tsunami”—the aging of what is historically America’s largest generation—the Baby Boomers, born 1946-1965. Each U.S. Boomer will be 65 or older by 2030. This means that 65 million people face urgent questions about planning for things like aging-in-place and advance directives, as they’re also grieving their own parents. More airtime is being offered to these conversations in the public square, as is evident in the New York Times’ ‘Death and Dying’ series with Dr. George Yancy. But even in the face of pandemic, we still search only for cures in lieu of meaning. 

I haven't sat with over 200 dying patients al all races, etc.  I have conducted funerals for teenagers killed in a traffic accident, an event that shook the small community they lived in to the core.  I was one of several pastors to conduct funeral services for the children (there were six in the car, if memory serves).  The funeral home set up the coffins and simply moved the chairs from one side of the small building to the other.  I've never conducted a funeral so packed with mourners.  Their friends crowded the cemetery for so long after the graveside service they had to be asked to leave in the evening so the graves could be closed.  I conducted a funeral for an infant, and faced a mother asking me, with tears streaming down her face, why God wanted her baby.  I buried my uncle, and nearly didn't get through the service myself.  I buried my mother, my father, a childhood friend who died too young from cancer (and tried to comfort her grieving mother, another friend from my childhood).  I watched my mother-in-law die of colon cancer, in a time when there were few, if any treatments for that disease (and no screening tests available).  I watched my father weep uncontrollably on the eve of his second open heart surgery, admitting to my mother he didn't want to die.  He meant on the operating table.  When he did die, 30-40 years later (I should know when that was, but time has its way with my memory), he wasn't afraid at all.  Neither was my mother, who died weeks before turning 91.  Yes, Boomers especially need to think about aging and medical directives.  But while it's a popular cliche that Americans think they are invincible, I've yet to meet one person who actually did think that.

Children, teenagers especially, can't imagine their deaths; but that's normal, if not even natural. People who might die in middle age, or early adulthood, are understandably frightened by the prospect.  But that fear indicates they hardly think themselves invincible.  Maybe teenagers do, or maybe the idea of mortality is just not real enough for them.  I knew a college student, a contemporary, who committed suicide in college.  I heard the news a few years after I'd last seen here, but it drove home the reality of death (and the horror of suicide) quite forcibly.  I got a tetanus shot today, because my last booster was 10 years ago.  On the way home I did the math, and calculated I'll probably get three more such shots, if I'm lucky.  Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons; I find I can do it in tetanus injections.  Am I even right about that?  Who knows?  But it's no longer a prospect of unforeseeable boosters into the future; it's quite finite.  Maybe more finite than even I expect.  Who can say?

I deeply appreciate the idea that we search only for cures in lieu of meaning, but I don't think searching for cures drives out the search for meaning.  Indeed, I question the search for meaning.  I am a child of the Sixties, of the French existentialists, of the literature of the absurd.  That's not a defense, not a justification based on an appeal to authority; it's simply acknowledgment of the basis of my thought.  Meaning, for me, is overrated.  Jesus of Nazareth gave meaning to the lives of nameless people, the people Thomas Grey eventually eulogized in the country graveyard, by telling them they mattered more than the birds in the air.  He didn't give them meaning by telling them they were part of a cosmic plan, or that God had a use for each one of them (as if utilitarianism is a measure of worth anyway) or that there was a secret to which only they would be privy (that's more John's gospel, anyway, and it's an outlier for reasons I find sounder than Bultmann did).  Meaning is found in living, not in esoteric explanations.  Meaning is found in other people (which is surely where I part company with Sartre and Camus; almost at the root, as it were).  But I presume what Ms. Trent means by "meaning" in life.  Perhaps I'm wrong to do so.  The term, however, doesn't have one universal definition, and the one most commonly referenced is the one I'm rejecting.

Life does need meaning, because:

If there was no eternal consciousness in a man [sic], if at the foundations of all things there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satisfied lay hidden beneath all--what then would life be but despair?*

(is it wrong that I want to stop and divert the discussion onto the subject of "insignificant" and "signified" and "signifier" and the further question of meaning?  Yeah, probably.  Put a pin in that, though.)  Not an idle conjecture by Johannes de Silentio, either; it's the picture of reality as imagined by the Greeks once upon a time.  Life is more than that, but the Christian witness is not the only witness, just as the American cliche of the absolute denial of death is not the experience of all Americans.  None of us get out of here alive, but that's hardly a revelation.  What we do with our lives, not because of that fact but in spite of it, that's where things get interesting.  Indeed, the Trumpian answer to our current crisis is that so few will die it's a crisis not worth being upset about.  The corollary, I suppose, is if you're among the dead, you won't care, either.

Neither, of course, is any answer at all.  Death may be inevitable; that doesn't mean we should rush to embrace it.  Death is certainly part of life; we should certainly accept it.  But whether or not that reality is tangled up with questions of meaning; well, there is no necessary connection there.  How we live makes the life we have meaningful.  And there the fable J.K. Rowling invented for Harry Potter is salutary.  It seems that of the three brothers who had the three deathly hallows, the last used his to gain wisdom; and when it came his time to die, the story goes, he greeted death like an old friend.  I like to think my parents did, too, in their own ways.  Maybe that gives too much meaning to their stories; I don't know.  I find myself still working out what life without them now actually means.  But death is less and less important after such reflections; what was done in life, is what matters.  Death just means life, at least life here and now, doesn't go on forever.

Which may mean something, too; but that has to be handled rather carefully.

*Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling, tr. Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press, 1973, p. 30.