The Order of a Good Death
While reading a University of Chicago Alumnae magazine (Mar-Apr 2013), I came across an interview with a young woman who is also a mortician and who started the web site, The Order of a Good Death. What a fascinating idea. I was immediately intrigued, dropped the magazine, and zoomed to the website (I suppose just another example of the distractions that internet accessibility provides). But, as Montaigne said, "To philosophize is to learn how to die". And all of life is geared in that direction whether we acknowledge it or not. Given that I started this commonplace book as a way to make sense of my own mindful wanderings, it seems like death is front and center even when it's hidden and ignored. My take on this site is that everyone should read some of the posts and comments if only as a way to understand the death industry from someone who is both critical of and a part of that industry.
I enjoyed perusing the site (I say that without apology for my morbidness in recognition that thinking about our inevitable fate should not be something apologized for). It's a mix of essays, photos and even videos. My only disappointment was that it is quite small. So either there are not a lot of people aware of the site or most people just aren't interested in contributing to something that embraces our relationship to death so unapologetically (is that a word?).
After reading, thinking, my thoughts are not very ordered but it does seem to me that death is just returning our bodies to the "dust" of which we come. When my kids were little and would ask, what happens when we die, I would answer "You turn into a tree or bunny or banana" (I always liked to throw in banana in those tricky questions to keep things light). As they got older, they wanted to know just exactly how it was their corporal body was going to somehow transform itself into a tree. I would then explain not quite accurately that the world is made of organic particles, tons and tons of them, and we are too. When we die, our organic particles get mixed in the big soup of organic particles and can wind up anywhere (usually, they wandered off about this point and I never had to explain further). They never seemed too worried or frightened by this idea, and my son would often throw in just what he wanted to turn into after he died, "I hope I'm an ant" he might say after watching ants busily creating an ant hill, or "I want to be a bunny so I can play with my bunny."
Assuming that this is more or less what happens to our body after we die, what makes the idea so terrifying? I can understand our fear of others dying better than our fear of dying ourselves. If someone else dies, we will really miss him or her, but if we die, we won't even notice.
I was talking to someone the other day whose daughter thinks the mother is going to hell after she dies because she is not "born again." The daughter regularly cries at the horrible fate awaiting her mother. It does seem pretty scary to me, as well, if I believed that. But, when I queried a bit further about what the daughter thinks this "hell" is the answer was so unsatisfactory that it made hell lose all of its fearsome power. Hell, the daughter said, is "not being with God." I was trying to think about this. If the mother is currently a non-believer, doesn't that mean she is currently "not with God?" In which case, "hell" is a pretty good place because the mother is currently very happy. Dante's version of hell of course is much more terrifying in its particulars, but is it ultimately also the idea that God is absent? Does a terrifying hell require the presence of a loving God? And is it only lack of imagination that makes hell seem so prosaic to me? It is simply impossible for me to imagine that somewhere there is a place "hell" or that it has lots of deepening circles.
Is death really scary because we don't know what happens, or is the idea that we don't know what happens just inculcated to scare us into adopting bizarre, irrational and scary beliefs about it? We do know what happens when we die--our bodies decay just like all organic matter does. So, what is it that keeps us angling for something better, different, punishing, rewarding after that decay?
The author of The Order of a Good Death mentions that we have children as a way to escape, avoid death by passing on our genes and somehow carrying on some of that chemical crap we are made of. Made me think again of PD James book Children of Men (see previous post). What would our world be like and our conception of death if children were not a part of it? How much does our behavior reflect this notion that we are passing on our genes, our society, our environment to the next generation?
I enjoyed perusing the site (I say that without apology for my morbidness in recognition that thinking about our inevitable fate should not be something apologized for). It's a mix of essays, photos and even videos. My only disappointment was that it is quite small. So either there are not a lot of people aware of the site or most people just aren't interested in contributing to something that embraces our relationship to death so unapologetically (is that a word?).
After reading, thinking, my thoughts are not very ordered but it does seem to me that death is just returning our bodies to the "dust" of which we come. When my kids were little and would ask, what happens when we die, I would answer "You turn into a tree or bunny or banana" (I always liked to throw in banana in those tricky questions to keep things light). As they got older, they wanted to know just exactly how it was their corporal body was going to somehow transform itself into a tree. I would then explain not quite accurately that the world is made of organic particles, tons and tons of them, and we are too. When we die, our organic particles get mixed in the big soup of organic particles and can wind up anywhere (usually, they wandered off about this point and I never had to explain further). They never seemed too worried or frightened by this idea, and my son would often throw in just what he wanted to turn into after he died, "I hope I'm an ant" he might say after watching ants busily creating an ant hill, or "I want to be a bunny so I can play with my bunny."
Assuming that this is more or less what happens to our body after we die, what makes the idea so terrifying? I can understand our fear of others dying better than our fear of dying ourselves. If someone else dies, we will really miss him or her, but if we die, we won't even notice.
I was talking to someone the other day whose daughter thinks the mother is going to hell after she dies because she is not "born again." The daughter regularly cries at the horrible fate awaiting her mother. It does seem pretty scary to me, as well, if I believed that. But, when I queried a bit further about what the daughter thinks this "hell" is the answer was so unsatisfactory that it made hell lose all of its fearsome power. Hell, the daughter said, is "not being with God." I was trying to think about this. If the mother is currently a non-believer, doesn't that mean she is currently "not with God?" In which case, "hell" is a pretty good place because the mother is currently very happy. Dante's version of hell of course is much more terrifying in its particulars, but is it ultimately also the idea that God is absent? Does a terrifying hell require the presence of a loving God? And is it only lack of imagination that makes hell seem so prosaic to me? It is simply impossible for me to imagine that somewhere there is a place "hell" or that it has lots of deepening circles.
Is death really scary because we don't know what happens, or is the idea that we don't know what happens just inculcated to scare us into adopting bizarre, irrational and scary beliefs about it? We do know what happens when we die--our bodies decay just like all organic matter does. So, what is it that keeps us angling for something better, different, punishing, rewarding after that decay?
The author of The Order of a Good Death mentions that we have children as a way to escape, avoid death by passing on our genes and somehow carrying on some of that chemical crap we are made of. Made me think again of PD James book Children of Men (see previous post). What would our world be like and our conception of death if children were not a part of it? How much does our behavior reflect this notion that we are passing on our genes, our society, our environment to the next generation?
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