Another sleepless night—just me? anyone else?—has me thinking about death. I laugh out loud writing that sentence, but it’s true. I’m writing a thesis right now about Julian of Norwich, my favorite medieval mystic who prayed for illness that would convince herself and everyone around her that she was dying, so that she might understand the suffering of Jesus Christ. Through this suffering she was given a series of visions that transformed her understanding of God.
It seems sacrilegious to write about a woman who wanted to fall ill in the midst of a pandemic like the one we’re living and dying through. But tonight I’m thinking about how hard it is for us to understand what death is, how much we struggle to talk about death.
I was with a fair amount of people who were dying and who died while serving as a chaplain intern this summer. Most of them I never got to know until they were close to death, through their friends, family, or spouses, because they couldn’t communicate with me in words. They were young and old, local and from out of town, Covid patients and people who were dying because their bodies couldn’t work anymore.
I remember one guy I met named Marshall (obviously not his real name) who was dying. He had my birthdate. Literally, we two came into the world on the same date. Different parts of the country, different parents, different lives, Marshall wound up in the situation that despite having an only slightly worn 41-year-old body, his brain was not functional. He had no chance—no chance—of regaining consciousness. His mother, sister, and girlfriend, after wrestling with this information for days and talking repeatedly with his doctors, decided to change his course of treatment from attempting to (unsuccessfully) extend his life, to care that would allow him to die peacefully and painlessly.
We’ve all seen the movie, right? A nurse or two makes a couple of efficient moves and then leaves the room silently; a loved one tearfully holds the hand of the dying, bedside; the rhythmic pulse of the heart monitor suddenly becomes more prominent in the sound design—beep… Beep… Beep…BEEP…BEEP…—then that monotonous tone erupts—BEEEEEEEEEE!!!!—and the softly weeping protagonist breaks down into sobs. Cue the orchestra swell.
That’s not how it happens. That’s not how this happened.
Days went by. Marshall didn’t die. Despite his history, I learned from some of his care providers, he was a person with a strong body. His organs weren’t just going to snap off like flipping a light switch. Death happens on its own schedule. Meantime, Marshall’s body was going to continue to have certain kinds of responses: movements, eye twitches, even sounds occasionally. His family was racked with guilt and uncertainty. Had they made the right choice? Maybe Marsh was trying to tell them something. Did you see that? See that, he moved! Maybe he’s still in there!
The care team paged Spiritual Care, and I was the one holding the hot potato (I was likely one of only two people from Spiritual Care in the thousand-bed hospital at the time), so I went down and spent some time with his family. I think I sat and talked with them for close to an hour, maybe more. I remember I said the words die, dying, died, death, dead more in that hour of care than I think I had so far that summer. It didn’t feel like the word was violent or jarring or out of place. It felt like the necessary word to describe what Marshall and his family were experiencing. Marshall was dying; his family was waiting for him to die.
We talked about who Marshall was to them. We talked about how confused and frightened they were. We talked about how hard the care team had worked to care for him, and how they, Marshall’s loved ones, could rest assured that they’d gotten the best medical advice possible about Marshall’s situation. And we told God how pissed off we were.
I pray like this a lot to God on my own. I don’t use thee or thou, I don’t get poetic or prolific in my language, and I don’t use Latin; I blend genders, I ask sometimes what are you doing, and I say, I’m scared. I’m angry. I’m hurting. I’m lonely. I don’t understand. I appreciate praying this way. It feels like the most honest and vulnerable way that I can talk to God. No bullshit, no ceremony, the sacred in the profane. Here I am, on my face, or standing in the rain shaking my fist at the lightning.
We’d rather use metaphors or euphemisms for death than just say that we die, you’re dying, they’re dead. Gone…, is one I hear, with a pregnant ellipsis that’s supposed to indicate that it’s not gone fishing or gone to the store. “No longer with us”, like a break up of which we just can’t name the scope and permanence. Then there are the Hallmark-y quasi-Heavenly ones—she’s gone Home, or is in a better place. I feel like I choke on that one. It’s all so sanitized.
We’re dying. People are dying. I said it in the pulpit two days ago. Saying it in a pulpit doesn’t make it more true or less true. It was always true. Covid has forced us all to reckon with our own mortality, with our fear, with the reality of our own death and the death of everything we love, everything we hate, everything we know. I don’t think we’re very good at it, and here’s a hard truth: I’m not sure how much our religion helps. So many fellow followers of Christ cling to the practice of our faith because of the promise it can make of us never having to confront death. It’s not the radical love of Christ that we want to emulate or the devotion to the poor and justice that Jesus modeled that we practice; we worship because we are afraid that if we don’t death will be final, and that we’ll suffer forever.
I’m not super interested in arguing this point, frankly. Maybe I should be, but what happens to me when I die is just… I am more interested in living like Christ than striking a deal with him to avoid death. When this argument starts to circle in my head (usually in a voice that is part-charismatic male preacher and part-my mother), James Baldwin quotes start to kick in: “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps that is the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”
Marshall’s family seemed to appreciate praying this way, just telling God the truth about how hard confronting this death was for them. One of his relatives even said so. I’ve never prayed like that before… it felt good, I feel better. Think of that: naming death, and the struggle that these folks had coming to grips with Marshall’s death was helpful, rather than trying to cling to some pain to that would be made right after death, or in the end of time. Do we have to demand that our faith make us these promises in order for it to have value in our lives?
I remember learning last summer that the chaplain is sometimes the only person who says the word die to family of a patient who’s died, and that sometimes it can be a kind of relief for them. A valve opens, they can sink into the reality against which they’ve been braced. Finally, someone’s just being tenderly honest with them. I don’t know if that’s a universal truth of spiritual care or not. I suppose only time and experience will tell.
I’m dying. You’re dying. Because we are both dying sooner or faster than we think, let us think deeply about how we want to live, how we want to treat ourselves, treat one another. Let us “earn [our] death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.” (That’s Baldwin, too.) Let’s breathe deeply together while we can, and treat each other like the sacred beings we are. Let’s spend our energy and attention on things we value. Let us love one another, deeply, thoroughly, humbly and tenderly, with our words, our actions, our resources.