Several things come to mind as I've just reached my seventies. Much harder than contemplating my own death is that of my loved ones - my wife, our cats, members of my extended family and close friends. Keeping in mind that some day I will no longer be here is a very beneficial exercise for me as it daily reminds me to savor and enjoy the wonderful simple things in my life while I am still alive that would be so easy to take for granted - the smell of freshly cooked food, the feel of water on my lips, the wind on my face, the amazing ability to still walk without pain and even play sports, the routines of taking out the garbage, brushing my teeth, making music with friends, enjoying the sound of my wife’s voice while she’s talking to me, the warmth of my cat on my lap. When I was in my 30s or 40s, the idea of 10, 20, 30 years hence was merely idle speculation but now it is very possible I may indeed never get there. And given that subjective time has really sped up as I’ve aged it becomes all the more sobering.
After much contemplation of death I’ve come to believe that we don’t disappear but that we simply are transformed into a different being of a type that is completely beyond our ability to comprehend hence not worth worrying about while I’m alive, sort of like a raindrop that falls into a pond or the ocean. How could that single drop ever comprehend what becomes of it as it completes its fall? It doesn’t cease to be water but it has entered a new realm entirely. Add to the fact that when we were born we had no idea what was happening to us and don’t have the slightest recall of whence we came. I’m not religious at all but I don’t see how any of that would conflict with serious religious teachings.
For now I conceive of death as being similar to being asleep. Every time I drift off at night I accept that I will completely lose control of what I will experience in my dreams and even more so when I reach deep sleep and effectively everything no longer exists for me. Maybe sleep is nature’s kind way to remind us of our coming death on a daily basis.
Indeed. As John Donne wrote (if memory serves), “From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, and soonest our best men with thee do go, rest of their bones and soul’s delivery.”
I would also agree that contemplation of one’s own death is in some ways easier than the death of our loved ones. Memento mori is a call for attentiveness and the pursuit of wisdom. Memento mortem seems to require impossible levels of either non-attachment or hope.
Some very helpful recommendations. I’d add Jung to the mix since much of his practice was preparing men and women in their twilight years for their death.
“Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.” - C.G. Jung
In the Zen priest and poet tradition, in Japan, The writer, usually upon his death bed, even weeks, or months, before, writes a Haiku that encapsulates his enlightenment. The poem must also reference the season. There's a book titled, Japanese Death Poems.
wind blowing all night,
dust and leaves swirl on the porch,
in the morning gone.
The Buddhist view of death is decidedly different than the Western view. One size doesn't fit all, and as Mr. Gonzo said, " The only people who know where the edge is, are those who have gone over it.
At the age of 84, I'm standing on the edge, looking into the vastness and ready to jump, but don't push me.
The Buddhists study consciousness. Is that not what is quintessential? Yet, what we have not measured, nor quantified except by direct experience. Even then, it is elusive to describe. I believe Plato's Allegory of the Cave is the contemporary teaching of the movie projector and the light bulb (where the lightbulb (or the sun) is consciousness). A contemporary version, whispered ear to ear down the lineages from the time of Alexander. Death is viewed as a unique and cherished opportunity to export directly into the All. As such they have an entire book of guidance, including a map of the edge. At this time, the living culture still has the handed down context for the book. It is the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Many of the Buddhist practices are directed at lucid, directed and purposeful death, either to come back as a Tulku, if one has taken such a vow, or to otherwise end one's accidental meandering in Samsara. A layer to this might be readings on reincarnation. In particular Ian Stevenson's work out of the University of Virginia. If they are right, it would literally be the answer to everything that matters, and yet it is entirely obscure and at risk of the living knowledge being extinguished.
Describing the Alabama soldiers who died as having fallen asleep is a Biblical allusion. There are at least two instances where Jesus is said to have raised the dead; for example, when he heard that his friend Lazarus had died, he told his followers something along the lines of, "He is not dead, but sleeping, but I go that I may awaken him." This sleep metaphor is carried forward in the New Testament Epistles, where believers who have died are said to have "fallen asleep in Christ" (a phrase meant to affirm the continuation of their spirit or conscious existence in heaven as well as the hope of their--eventual--resurrection).
Also, Ted's partly incorrect that "Nobody is “called home” anymore, in E.T. fashion—at least not in a newspaper writeup." Even in 2023, obituaries in the South from rural and/or African-American families will still use this phrase. True, those obits are written by the family and not by journalists, but in 2023 there aren't that many journalists writing copy for papers anymore. "Contributed" material from non-journalistic sources makes up more and more newspaper content.
This is so great! I am alone in my social circle in wanting to discuss death and dying and aging. They become angry and change the subject. They are each between 73 and 85. Anyway, love this essay and the list. I feel less alone. Thank you 🙏🏼
Very interesting that you should post on this topic, because I had been reflecting how parallel your chapters on Music To Raise The Dead, particularly its emphasis on the hero's journey to underworld and return, are to the literature of near-death experiences.
It was Dante's Divine Comedy that struck me in its similarity to the stories of near-death experiences.
I'm sure there are a hundred books that could be added to this list. But for me, The Old Man and the Sea is in my top 5 books on accepting mortality and pondering death.
Well timed article, with lots of current activity on the 'Medical Aid in Dying' arena. We're up to 10-11 States that allow MAID, starting with Oregon quite a few years ago.
NPR just published this article about the relative lack of benefit and actual harm from CPR in the elderly. Not everything you see on TV is true!
My state passed a MAID law last year. In the first six months over 35 people used the law. Thats how urgently needed it is! I felt instantly better when the law passed.
Thanks for this link. It has been almost 2 years since my wonderful wife of 35 years passed away. I am still having trouble with it some days - Like today. After many many trips to the ER - where they brought her back to a pretty decent state actually, she was talking one day to some doctor - don't remember who. But he asked her if she wasn't getting tired of this routine. ( I realize more now just how long & the extent to which she had been suffering). He talked to her about Hospice & we then talked about it. Didn't take her long to sign up.
We posted those green - do not resuscitate forms all over our place. You couldn't miss them. Then one time, a young 911 medic Intubated her while out in the back on the way to the ambulance. I was not standing right there in that moment. He disregarded all that we had posted & said. It wasn't but a week or 2 she lasted after that.
3 days before she died she had a remarkable turnaround ( I was later told this is very common). Even got a picture of her smiling. Then came the final 2 days when she slipped into that state & I knew this was it.
I always find it strange saying "she had a pretty good death", but her decision to go the Hospice way was for her, a very good decision.
Sorry, but one tends to take a different approach when Death unwantingly becomes a profound part of one's existence at a young age. This October, for instance, will be 45 years since my Dad died, when I was but 13. Because people such as myself experience grief daily, it's easiest to become resigned to the reality of Death, and live whatever time we have to the fullest. The last thing I need is to wade heavily into someone else's experiences and philosophies regarding Death, and I have absolutely no desire to take on some mystical outlook that has no basis in reality. Life has already been painful enough, and it takes almost all of my existing energy attempting to remain positive and optimistic for my family and friends.
I empathize with what you’ve been through. My mother died three weeks before my eleventh birthday. The date recently came and went; it’s been 52 years. I will soon turn 63 and seem to be ruminating about it more often in recent years. I never got to know her as an adult, or even a teenager. There are a few precious momentoes and a lot of old pictures but not much else.
What I have had is the growing awareness that from the fullness of her love I was left with what I needed to keep living. To get some sense of what it was I’ve pieced together a vague simulacra like the fragments of an old map retrieved from a document shredder, one partly intact but mostly known by what other maps of similar places show. She had had 2 miscarriages before I came along. Blond, left handed, pretty, and relatively tall for the time. She was also born to a devout family. But her relationship with my father began as an adulterous affair, and they were married a few months after his wife committed suicide. His fourth marriage would be his last and when she died they missed their 18th anniversary by three months. He was a brilliant but difficult man. He was also 20 years older than her. Of all that I wish I knew, their struggle to come to terms with their ‘origin story’ remains the primary object of my curiosity. But that would likely have been largely held from view anyway. One thing I can be sure of - besides a few odds and ends - was her human fallibility.
But she does seem to have made a graceful exit. I have some memories and other evidence for that. She had to have had a strong capacity for reflection to pull that off; she was 43 and had been raised in a Calvinist household that considered divine retribution for past sins a near certainty. Yet she managed to write candid but comforting letters to my dad and her parents even as cancer did it’s final work. She died at home peacefully. There is no suitable synonym for what she gave me; no finer point can be put on it now: love. What else to describe that which remained a source of something positive and sustaining? Not all that it might have been, but enough.
It’s too late to get much more out of it, but I have lived to be a teacher, a father, a husband. Her fingerprints are all over the lot of it, the things I am so deeply grateful for.
A good death isn’t within everyone’s reach. But there isn’t any surprise to be had about the ultimate outcome, either. There aren’t any alternatives, so resignation doesn’t really cut it, it just seems like the remnant of petulance. Prepare for the inevitable by living. Life is short, the interruption of eternal silence that we must do what we can with.
More than a decade ago, my mother had a stroke and the doctor came into the hospital room and was speaking to us in doctor-ese, when I asked him, “What are the chances of her dying?” He looked at me strangely and, at first, I thought judgmentally, but quickly changed his approach. He began to speak in actual human language. We subsequently helped my mother get off the incredible number of prescription medications she had been on for years, since her first stroke, helped her through therapy, and she was able to live a few more (comparatively) quality years before she died.
I read the piece on deathbed visions. None of this is new to me. My grandparents and elderly relatives, even my father who died as a relatively young man, all died at home, and it was a known fact that they would start talking to/ about* their mother or deceased spouse or whoever was important. It was part of what was seen as a lovely death. Then it was time to call the priest, it was time to call distant relatives home, it was time - to be pragmatic - to ready the house the wake.
It's a comfort to everyone to witness, to know your loved one isn't going alone.
It drives me crazy when people say somebody "passed," instead of, you know, "she died." I make it a point to always say "died." I'm 66 now, but when I was 28, my younger brother, 27, died at home from pancreatic cancer. He insisted that I irrigate him--twice a day or so I injected, through a tube, saline solution to help his damaged liver function. I knew he was dying, but for months no one told us what he had. The worst thing is, they wouldn't tell him! He suffered a mental breakdown years before and apparently the doctors and perhaps my parents felt the knowledge of his impending death would be too much. They were wrong of course; he was able to figure out he was dying pretty early on, and he faced it well.
My mom and I found him on the bedroom floor late one weekend, after she heard him hit the floor. He had tried to get up. He was dead weight when we picked him up and put him in the bed, heavy, though he was skin and bones by that time. He was at home, and it makes a big difference, though he never had hospice care.
Several things come to mind as I've just reached my seventies. Much harder than contemplating my own death is that of my loved ones - my wife, our cats, members of my extended family and close friends. Keeping in mind that some day I will no longer be here is a very beneficial exercise for me as it daily reminds me to savor and enjoy the wonderful simple things in my life while I am still alive that would be so easy to take for granted - the smell of freshly cooked food, the feel of water on my lips, the wind on my face, the amazing ability to still walk without pain and even play sports, the routines of taking out the garbage, brushing my teeth, making music with friends, enjoying the sound of my wife’s voice while she’s talking to me, the warmth of my cat on my lap. When I was in my 30s or 40s, the idea of 10, 20, 30 years hence was merely idle speculation but now it is very possible I may indeed never get there. And given that subjective time has really sped up as I’ve aged it becomes all the more sobering.
After much contemplation of death I’ve come to believe that we don’t disappear but that we simply are transformed into a different being of a type that is completely beyond our ability to comprehend hence not worth worrying about while I’m alive, sort of like a raindrop that falls into a pond or the ocean. How could that single drop ever comprehend what becomes of it as it completes its fall? It doesn’t cease to be water but it has entered a new realm entirely. Add to the fact that when we were born we had no idea what was happening to us and don’t have the slightest recall of whence we came. I’m not religious at all but I don’t see how any of that would conflict with serious religious teachings.
For now I conceive of death as being similar to being asleep. Every time I drift off at night I accept that I will completely lose control of what I will experience in my dreams and even more so when I reach deep sleep and effectively everything no longer exists for me. Maybe sleep is nature’s kind way to remind us of our coming death on a daily basis.
Indeed. As John Donne wrote (if memory serves), “From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, and soonest our best men with thee do go, rest of their bones and soul’s delivery.”
I would also agree that contemplation of one’s own death is in some ways easier than the death of our loved ones. Memento mori is a call for attentiveness and the pursuit of wisdom. Memento mortem seems to require impossible levels of either non-attachment or hope.
I like your raindrop metaphor.
Or as the bard sang: we lose our grip/and then we slip/into the masterpiece
excellent
Some very helpful recommendations. I’d add Jung to the mix since much of his practice was preparing men and women in their twilight years for their death.
“Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.” - C.G. Jung
More than once Jung wrote about death as a goal and not an end.
In the Zen priest and poet tradition, in Japan, The writer, usually upon his death bed, even weeks, or months, before, writes a Haiku that encapsulates his enlightenment. The poem must also reference the season. There's a book titled, Japanese Death Poems.
wind blowing all night,
dust and leaves swirl on the porch,
in the morning gone.
The Buddhist view of death is decidedly different than the Western view. One size doesn't fit all, and as Mr. Gonzo said, " The only people who know where the edge is, are those who have gone over it.
At the age of 84, I'm standing on the edge, looking into the vastness and ready to jump, but don't push me.
The Buddhists study consciousness. Is that not what is quintessential? Yet, what we have not measured, nor quantified except by direct experience. Even then, it is elusive to describe. I believe Plato's Allegory of the Cave is the contemporary teaching of the movie projector and the light bulb (where the lightbulb (or the sun) is consciousness). A contemporary version, whispered ear to ear down the lineages from the time of Alexander. Death is viewed as a unique and cherished opportunity to export directly into the All. As such they have an entire book of guidance, including a map of the edge. At this time, the living culture still has the handed down context for the book. It is the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Many of the Buddhist practices are directed at lucid, directed and purposeful death, either to come back as a Tulku, if one has taken such a vow, or to otherwise end one's accidental meandering in Samsara. A layer to this might be readings on reincarnation. In particular Ian Stevenson's work out of the University of Virginia. If they are right, it would literally be the answer to everything that matters, and yet it is entirely obscure and at risk of the living knowledge being extinguished.
Death poem of Naganori:
More than cherry blossoms,
Inviting a wind to take them away
I wonder what to do
with the rest of spring.
Whenever I open
the book,
we are on
the same page
George Clinton(yes sir, THAT George Clinton😎)
Eulogy And Light
Our father
Which art on Wall Street
Honored be thy buck
Thy kingdom came
This be thy year
>From sea to shining sea
Thou givest me false pride
Funked down by the riverside
>From every head and ass, may dollars flow
Give us this pay
Our daily bread
Forgive us our goofs
As we rob from each other
He maketh me to sell dope to small children
For thou art evil
And we adore thee
Thy destruction and thy power
They comfort me
My Cadillac and my pinky ring
They restoreth me in thee
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of poverty
I must feel their envy
For I am loaded, high and all those other goodies
That go along with the good god big buck
To your horse
A ? grows there
Ahead in time, the unexpected soul-searching beam of the strobe
But now, the stairway looms
And as I rise
The cries of kittens, gray, make way
For there, now near
Here now, gone, alone
I feel my wrist, it flicks the switch
No lights reveal the room or me
She sees, then panics, grabs a light
I scream, silent comforts that are not heard
I panic, for I have not said a word
Hysteria hold the room in sway
I run, I back away, to hide
>From what?
>From fear?
The truth, the light?
Is truth the light?
Describing the Alabama soldiers who died as having fallen asleep is a Biblical allusion. There are at least two instances where Jesus is said to have raised the dead; for example, when he heard that his friend Lazarus had died, he told his followers something along the lines of, "He is not dead, but sleeping, but I go that I may awaken him." This sleep metaphor is carried forward in the New Testament Epistles, where believers who have died are said to have "fallen asleep in Christ" (a phrase meant to affirm the continuation of their spirit or conscious existence in heaven as well as the hope of their--eventual--resurrection).
A third is Jesus's resurrection of Jairus' daughter in Luke 8, where He says, "Do not weep, for she is not dead, but sleeping."
Someone, I think it was James hillman, said that Lazarus was never debriefed.
Also, Ted's partly incorrect that "Nobody is “called home” anymore, in E.T. fashion—at least not in a newspaper writeup." Even in 2023, obituaries in the South from rural and/or African-American families will still use this phrase. True, those obits are written by the family and not by journalists, but in 2023 there aren't that many journalists writing copy for papers anymore. "Contributed" material from non-journalistic sources makes up more and more newspaper content.
The Year of Magical Thinking is an amazing harrowing book that I won't read again.
Ted, you twisted my arm with your superb writing so much that I had to subscribe to your Substack, damn it!
This is so great! I am alone in my social circle in wanting to discuss death and dying and aging. They become angry and change the subject. They are each between 73 and 85. Anyway, love this essay and the list. I feel less alone. Thank you 🙏🏼
Very sorry to hear you are encountering this behavior toward you. Not surprised to hear this attitude though, from others.
Ted as you know we live in a culture that is terrified of death. The emphasis on youth and life extension at all costs underlines this.
Ted,
Very interesting that you should post on this topic, because I had been reflecting how parallel your chapters on Music To Raise The Dead, particularly its emphasis on the hero's journey to underworld and return, are to the literature of near-death experiences.
It was Dante's Divine Comedy that struck me in its similarity to the stories of near-death experiences.
I'm sure there are a hundred books that could be added to this list. But for me, The Old Man and the Sea is in my top 5 books on accepting mortality and pondering death.
Well timed article, with lots of current activity on the 'Medical Aid in Dying' arena. We're up to 10-11 States that allow MAID, starting with Oregon quite a few years ago.
NPR just published this article about the relative lack of benefit and actual harm from CPR in the elderly. Not everything you see on TV is true!
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/29/1177914622/a-natural-death-may-be-preferable-for-many-than-enduring-cpr
My state passed a MAID law last year. In the first six months over 35 people used the law. Thats how urgently needed it is! I felt instantly better when the law passed.
Thanks for this link. It has been almost 2 years since my wonderful wife of 35 years passed away. I am still having trouble with it some days - Like today. After many many trips to the ER - where they brought her back to a pretty decent state actually, she was talking one day to some doctor - don't remember who. But he asked her if she wasn't getting tired of this routine. ( I realize more now just how long & the extent to which she had been suffering). He talked to her about Hospice & we then talked about it. Didn't take her long to sign up.
We posted those green - do not resuscitate forms all over our place. You couldn't miss them. Then one time, a young 911 medic Intubated her while out in the back on the way to the ambulance. I was not standing right there in that moment. He disregarded all that we had posted & said. It wasn't but a week or 2 she lasted after that.
3 days before she died she had a remarkable turnaround ( I was later told this is very common). Even got a picture of her smiling. Then came the final 2 days when she slipped into that state & I knew this was it.
I always find it strange saying "she had a pretty good death", but her decision to go the Hospice way was for her, a very good decision.
Sorry, but one tends to take a different approach when Death unwantingly becomes a profound part of one's existence at a young age. This October, for instance, will be 45 years since my Dad died, when I was but 13. Because people such as myself experience grief daily, it's easiest to become resigned to the reality of Death, and live whatever time we have to the fullest. The last thing I need is to wade heavily into someone else's experiences and philosophies regarding Death, and I have absolutely no desire to take on some mystical outlook that has no basis in reality. Life has already been painful enough, and it takes almost all of my existing energy attempting to remain positive and optimistic for my family and friends.
I empathize with what you’ve been through. My mother died three weeks before my eleventh birthday. The date recently came and went; it’s been 52 years. I will soon turn 63 and seem to be ruminating about it more often in recent years. I never got to know her as an adult, or even a teenager. There are a few precious momentoes and a lot of old pictures but not much else.
What I have had is the growing awareness that from the fullness of her love I was left with what I needed to keep living. To get some sense of what it was I’ve pieced together a vague simulacra like the fragments of an old map retrieved from a document shredder, one partly intact but mostly known by what other maps of similar places show. She had had 2 miscarriages before I came along. Blond, left handed, pretty, and relatively tall for the time. She was also born to a devout family. But her relationship with my father began as an adulterous affair, and they were married a few months after his wife committed suicide. His fourth marriage would be his last and when she died they missed their 18th anniversary by three months. He was a brilliant but difficult man. He was also 20 years older than her. Of all that I wish I knew, their struggle to come to terms with their ‘origin story’ remains the primary object of my curiosity. But that would likely have been largely held from view anyway. One thing I can be sure of - besides a few odds and ends - was her human fallibility.
But she does seem to have made a graceful exit. I have some memories and other evidence for that. She had to have had a strong capacity for reflection to pull that off; she was 43 and had been raised in a Calvinist household that considered divine retribution for past sins a near certainty. Yet she managed to write candid but comforting letters to my dad and her parents even as cancer did it’s final work. She died at home peacefully. There is no suitable synonym for what she gave me; no finer point can be put on it now: love. What else to describe that which remained a source of something positive and sustaining? Not all that it might have been, but enough.
It’s too late to get much more out of it, but I have lived to be a teacher, a father, a husband. Her fingerprints are all over the lot of it, the things I am so deeply grateful for.
A good death isn’t within everyone’s reach. But there isn’t any surprise to be had about the ultimate outcome, either. There aren’t any alternatives, so resignation doesn’t really cut it, it just seems like the remnant of petulance. Prepare for the inevitable by living. Life is short, the interruption of eternal silence that we must do what we can with.
More than a decade ago, my mother had a stroke and the doctor came into the hospital room and was speaking to us in doctor-ese, when I asked him, “What are the chances of her dying?” He looked at me strangely and, at first, I thought judgmentally, but quickly changed his approach. He began to speak in actual human language. We subsequently helped my mother get off the incredible number of prescription medications she had been on for years, since her first stroke, helped her through therapy, and she was able to live a few more (comparatively) quality years before she died.
I read the piece on deathbed visions. None of this is new to me. My grandparents and elderly relatives, even my father who died as a relatively young man, all died at home, and it was a known fact that they would start talking to/ about* their mother or deceased spouse or whoever was important. It was part of what was seen as a lovely death. Then it was time to call the priest, it was time to call distant relatives home, it was time - to be pragmatic - to ready the house the wake.
It's a comfort to everyone to witness, to know your loved one isn't going alone.
*Edited for clarity
It drives me crazy when people say somebody "passed," instead of, you know, "she died." I make it a point to always say "died." I'm 66 now, but when I was 28, my younger brother, 27, died at home from pancreatic cancer. He insisted that I irrigate him--twice a day or so I injected, through a tube, saline solution to help his damaged liver function. I knew he was dying, but for months no one told us what he had. The worst thing is, they wouldn't tell him! He suffered a mental breakdown years before and apparently the doctors and perhaps my parents felt the knowledge of his impending death would be too much. They were wrong of course; he was able to figure out he was dying pretty early on, and he faced it well.
My mom and I found him on the bedroom floor late one weekend, after she heard him hit the floor. He had tried to get up. He was dead weight when we picked him up and put him in the bed, heavy, though he was skin and bones by that time. He was at home, and it makes a big difference, though he never had hospice care.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich was absolutely haunting… I have also meant to reread it but haven’t done so yet.
Without death there is no life.
For me, Death is merely the price for this experience. How much would you pay to be here?
Is it really that high a price?