Death

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. — C.S. Lewis

I recently grieved the loss of a beloved pet. He was a good dog named Jersey. A consolation as he lied there breathing his last breath was that he shouldn’t have ever lived as long as he did; he was a rescue dog found in a garbage bag on the side of the road and he was almost mulled by a bear while I was camping with him. He was very instinctual and it would often get the best of him. When he was younger he would bite. Typically, a dog with that sort of temperament would be put down. Instead, we had him professionally trained. He continued for the rest of his life to battle those urges that welled up inside him to protect himself and others. You could see in his whole body when my brother would be testing him the immense degree of self-control he was exerting. His inner demons battling behind those beetle eyes:

“This is your body and it is being invaded. You’ve already growled ‘no’, what else is there to do but fight back?”

“Violence isn’t the answer! Walk or run away instead.”

Daemons were originally deities who spoke truth, after all. Jersey’s was loud.

He was the most empathetic dog I ever knew. If I cried he would lie down with me and ever so gently lick my tears away. He was primarily motivated by praise and affirmation. He reminded me of the idea C.S. Lewis taught me, the possibility that animals grew souls from being in an intimate relationship with a human soul. It did feel like he was an extension of myself.

So he’s passed away and I’m left with the consolation that he had a remarkable life, especially considering the earlier deaths he evaded.

The word shalom means peace within the wrestling. Across cultures and tribes it is understood that there can be no peace without two or more opposing forces—like the eye of a storm, or orbiting planets and stars and galaxies in the universe, pulling against each other’s weight. I find myself in this tug and pull when contemplating death and I wonder whether I will ever find my shalom with it. Growing up in a Christian community, death was always spoken of as evil, the enemy, unnatural, etc. In my adult years I have come to understand death as something that is not evil or against me or unnatural at all, especially when looking at the Ancient Jewish and Christian tradition, among other Ancient religions and philosophies.

The Ancient Wisdom understands that death is simply a part of life, an ever-present mystery, and often times good. What is mysterious about it is not that it is a gateway into the unknown, but that it can feel both perfectly good and abhorrently evil at the same time. In a Canadian winter, things die so that they can be reborn in spring. The very cells in our bodies die and are remade all the time. Before science could explain it, indigenous peoples knew above all that we are all one body and death brings new life. As Mufasa says, “We are all connected in the great circle of life.” So why has modern Christian tradition gone astray from this fundamental truth and demonized death? Power, greed, political agendas, mass manipulation, fear mongering, military mindsets, etc. But also, I would argue, that it is because death does have a sting. And that sting is often debilitating. Sometimes in order to survive it, we fight back, we blame it, we react against it with all the hate we can muster. We dig our heels into the pain while shouting, “Nothing good can come from this.”

This human response is valid, but unfinished. Many ancient cultures would indulge in these emotions to such a degree that as they carried their deceased through the streets, they screamed and tore their clothes apart. They would put ash on their head and wear sackcloth. And yet, the visceral stages of grief are reconciled in the last stage: Acceptance. That is all we can do, really—but true acceptance isn’t a placid response. It doesn’t mean you’ve just given into the inevitability of death and laid down your sword, but also walked across the battlefield to embrace the vivid reality that surrounds you, with all it’s pain and darkness and beauty and light. Acceptance is honouring the thing you’re grieving by allowing it to complete it’s life story. Death isn’t the end, remembrance is. After all, remembrance has a life of it’s own that never ends.

C.S. Lewis envisions a species on Mars in his science fiction Out of the Silent Planet that has this undisrupted understanding of life and death. Hyoi, a Hross native, explains to the man, “A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmán, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.”

Jersey could not be fully made real without the transition from life to memory. We can never be fully real, fully enjoyed, fully loved, fully alive without the embodiment of our memory which forms in our absence. What we do in this life and the imprint we leave on this world has an eternal life of its own.

This is my experience anyway. Perhaps it’s not useful to hear while we are screaming through the streets, but right now it resonates with me. 

In this framework, death is something I can not only accept, but embrace.

PS.

It’s been difficult to find scripture verses on death because it is often used as hyperbole or metaphor for suffering—and rightly so. However, the one consistency that I do find in scripture is that physical death is not the same as spiritual death.

There is a time for earthly death, as Solomon says—and as Jesus says, those who mourn it are blessed.

As for the Christian tradition, the “enemy” is not in our physical dying, but in our spiritual decaying with every action we make that leads us away from Love.

2 Corinthians 4:8-18