I have a friend who refuses to attend funerals – not even his own as there won’t be one. ”Nor for my wife, for that matter,” he added. “We know we are going to die one day so why make such a thing of it? Death’s just an event of life: it’s not tragic, it’s not unfair, it’s what happens. Let’s grow up and stop this funeral business.”
Doubtless he could have said lots about the funeral business, but we left it at that and I carried on with my everyday events, taking care that death was not one of them. So when I die one day, I thought, I would have been flatlining anyway: what would be different was that the line ended and was called death, not breakfast.
Death may be an everyday event, but the difference between it and my brushing my teeth is that I am alive at the basin but not in the nave. And that’s important. I cannot speak as one who has experienced death, but I very much like being alive and something that stops that experience distresses me. Death would deprive me of a best friend with whom I spend each day, conversing, deliberating, reprimanding and congratulating. Not only that but life also comes with a setting which is geared to happiness, which is no small plus. To settle for a deal that offers no heaven or hell, just nothingness, shows a lack of respect of and appreciation for life. It’s such a waste to die and not be around to advertise life’s good. In the court of human judgement, death should rightly be condemned as guilty of a baseless, arbitrary and detrimental action. “Not so,” I hear from the defence. “Life has no value: it is a fact, as is death.”
“But we stand in the court of life,” I say, “and while there is life it has value which is stolen by death.”
I attended a funeral recently. As I entered the church, a screen was flashing image after image of the man whom I had known. How different he looked with a beard….didn’t know he was a ranger…was that his first wife? Shot after shot they came, the screen pushing as much life into that death as possible. My friend, who was not there of course, might have wanted a photo of him, dead, but that was not to be. What he also would not have seen was the gap which that death had left in the world. Photographs could not fill that space, nor could those gathered to affirm his life, not his death.
What images could be shown at my funeral? Better get some shots before it’s too late. Then the absurdity of worrying about what people think of me when I am dead. Is that what my idea of an afterlife amounts to?
There’s not much interest in the afterlife nowadays. Life is all that matters: increasing longevity, searching for other life forms, cloning, grafting and designing lives-to-be. Shaped by the lack of belief in any existence which is not physical, the desire is not only to live happily but also as long as possible. The immaculate conception is to remain here, one’s body being rejuvenated through genetic manipulation, transplants and whatever else the burgeoning microbiological sciences can discover and develop. Cryogenic freezing is more the stuff of movies now, but its day may come too.
Apart from a fear of dying, there is good reason for the push to remain here: there is a disconnect between the body’s clock and that of the mind. When people with a three score-and-ten body feel, or think they feel, just as they did when half that age, it’s not surprising they want to override the body and rein in its ageing symptoms. Remote surgery, self-driving cars, robots that think, genetically modified embryos…cannot the line of death be breached by life?
It is not fun to age. Even if one is free of maladies, aches and chronic medication, one is aware of the reactions becoming slower, the sight less sharp, the hair (if it’s there) less lustrous. Worse than this is the awareness that the profile of the elderly records very few likes: most in that category have, at some moment, been guilty of dismissively referring to some group of people as “old”… then recognising that they are the same age. “Old” differs from babies, toddlers, kids, ‘tweens, teens, twentysomethings, Gen whatever, yuppies, the middle-aged…. these still have something going on ; old does not. It would be a very, very strange person who, given the choice of what age he or she would remain forever fixed, would choose old.
And if the day comes when Methuselah begins to get worried and taxes are the sole fact of life, would life lose some of its magic? A worker appreciates a holiday more than a pensioner. Without death would the life instinct slowly petrify and we become rock and live until the planet goes West?
I know that I will die and it saddens me to think of no longer being here with the taste of life on my lips and that sense of being me in my spirit. I know that I am meant to be alive and live as complete a life as possible; this makes each day precious and meaningful. I know that I shall have a funeral and will be there in the good company of life.
Oh gosh, Roger, an awareness of my own mortality has not so much crept up on me, but arrived by threatening leaps and bounds. I have been very, very close to dying two or three times during the course of my life, but until sickness became, in my mid sixties, ever more a fact of my life, I was able to shrug off these near misses, forget how I felt each time they visited me, and get a kick out of living.
Now however I am too often seized by physical pain, and by systems on the blink, to shrug off such an awareness: the imminence of my own mortality is a companion in all I do. I take some small comfort in the words of Our Lord: “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
Even before I came to know the Lord, I did not believe that death was the end of it all. And in this belief, I am one with millions of non-Christians who yet believe that death is but one door closing and another door opening.
As to living forever in the memory of others: so long as one person somewhere finds one of my books, reads it, and enjoys it, and wonders “Who is this writer?” and perhaps, tries to learn something about me on the Net, I shall not truly be dead. Glorious repute? Hardly! But if death occurs when there is not one person left alive in the World who remembers you, then perhaps a writer who is still read, never dies.