Living and Dying at the Same Time
Can you discern in this picture what is alive and what is dead?
Death, the inevitable. Death, the rejected. Do we feel sorry for death? No! Of course not. Is it separate from our lives or merely a natural part of them? What parts of our lives are we more comfortable with or at ease with and how do these factor into our relationship with death?
Whoa Barb . . . relationship with death, relationship to death. What is it that holds us to our life and, inevitably, leads us to our death? What is the meaning of this relationship? Well, I can only think that this kind of question is what poetry was meant for. . . so I turn to the Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott’s poem Love After Love:
The time will come when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Here is the poem read aloud (by Jon Kabat-Zinn)
When I started to put together this post, I thought I’d try a google search of my title, which tends to bring up something fascinating. Sure enough, there was another reminder about my lapsed New Yorker subscription . . . a post dated 11/6/16 by Nir Baram. The New Yorker has such insidious ways of luring subscribers back again and again! But I will remain undeterred.
So what might I say for this kind of post – brief, about something as impersonal and ultimately personal as death? I might describe the denouncing, distancing, the walking or running away from, that so many of us steadily manage over the years of our lives. But what happens when we realize that the distancing has only been in the shape of a giant and fascinatingly graceful circle, or perhaps a woven pattern or a circuitous route ala Jackson Pollock? Can we even recognize it as our own, part of our heritage as mortal beings?
How is it (I asked my engineer friend this last night) that we can gauge or measure someone or some thing’s age? Its beginning and its end? I certainly see the need for practical purposes to come up with such boundaries. But we tend to observe them without any questions at all. And the location of that separation as well as its origins, well that’s another matter. We might arrive at a place where or a time when we might question those boundaries. Whose death is it? Who dies? Stephen Levine’s book explores this well.
My post today is perhaps a window dressing of sorts for some writing I will be doing about the Colorado End of Life Options Act. I will be interrogating some of the ideas, beliefs, thoughts, expectations and so forth about dying and death (particularly euthanasia) in some future posts. I’ll close with a quote from a favorite poet, E.E. Cummings:
Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.
© Barbara E. Cashman 2017 www.DenverElderLaw.org