Several different events have occurred in the past couple of weeks that have been centered around how well or ill prepared we are for our own deaths. Last weekend in worship we remembered the Oakland Hills fire in which many of our members lost their homes and all of their possessions and in which many people in the community lost their lives. Just before the weekend, there were two rather mild but serious enough earthquakes to remind everyone that “the big one” can happen anytime, anywhere. One of our precious members has suffered a rapid decline in health and is losing the ability to interact cognitively. Another of our precious members suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and he ended up in the emergency room this weekend. In church on Sunday our children sang a beautiful song about the circle of the sun and the various life events (birth, walking, talking, marrying, dying, spreading ashes) occur in the circle of the sun.
All of these disconnected but sobering events lead to the question of how prepared we are for dying. In the western culture of the United States, we do not do a good job of talking about and preparing for death, nor do we allow for adequate mourning. In some other cultures, death is a natural part of living and not something to be feared or denied or from which to escape. Don’t you wonder why and how western culture became so death phobic? For many years I have heard about and seen the results of a culture that values youth to such an extreme extent that we marginalize and isolate our elderly in a number of ways. We segregate them and send them to nursing homes, care facilities, retirement homes and institutions at a time when they most need to be with a variety of generations. Rather than value their long lives, wisdom and experience, we would rather not have to see them in any kind of decline so we get them out of sight. Again, western culture is unusual in doing so. Is it the egg or the chicken? Is it that we value youth so much that we marginalize our elderly or is it that watching and caring for our elderly was so difficult that we began valuing youth in an extreme manner?
As a pastor, I am aware of how difficult it is for many people to talk about death. We have a large number of older people in our congregation and we seldom talk about their beliefs about an afterlife, their wishes for dying with dignity, their plans for what will happen if they become incapacitated, or even what they want to have done with their bodies in terms of burial or cremation. Why does it seem so difficult a conversation? Maybe it’s because of the fear of what happens in the dying process. Maybe it’s as simple as people enjoying lives that are full and meaningful and that have consisted of so much social action and working for justice that they want to keep going as long as is possible. Maybe it’s as complicated as not believing in any kind of afterlife and not knowing how to comprehend and process death being the final word. Whatever it is, it seems clear that the more we talk about it together, plan together, express feelings together and normalize it together, the better off we we’ll be in the end.
At the end of the day, I suppose death is a conversation a bit like conversations about the future. You can imagine, talk, dream, fear and wonder all you want and the reality is that no one has been there and come back to give the scoop. I grew up believing in the kind of heaven where the streets were paved of gold and every person had a mansion. At some point, I grew out of the idea of heaven as fantasy island. All I know is this: I cannot ever imagine a moment where I would be separated from God (not the anthropomorphic idea of God but the incarnate God, the God in me to the extent that God is visceral God) so when I think about dying and an afterlife, I know that in some form my spirit will live on with God’s Spirit. We are inseparable. Maybe that’s why I am comfortable talking about death. Just as I am not alone in life, I will not be alone in death and I believe it as though it’s part of my DNA.