October, a time to Ruminate about Death

We have arrived at that time of year in Colorado when the nights have gone from cool to genuinely cold. The mornings are frosty, and the afternoons are sharp and brisk on any of your exposed skin. Winter is a ways off, but Jack Frost is taking every chance he can get to practice his skills for the season to come. The Aspen trees in the nearby Rocky Mountains are reaching their peak of color. We say that Aspen are turning, as the green drains from their leaves turning a striking yellow before their inevitable departure. The field of grass outside of the window here is also giving up its green, fading into a rusty brown that will be all too common for the next few months. People are just starting to run their furnace on a regular basis and the unused smell of the air ducts sours the great indoors.

The oddly paganistic holiday that marks the end of the month has its heralds out in force. In the grocery stores, the seasonal aisle is full to the brim with bulk bags of miniature candies euphemistically called “fun” sized. Soon you children of every background, except for those being raised in the most austere traditions, will prepare to travel around their neighborhood seeking to collect as many goodies as they can.

Yet there is a deeper and darker side to Halloween, for this is the time of year when the wall between the world of the living and the world of the dead grows thin. As we approach and pass thru this Perihelion of Thanatos, we have an opportunity to slow down a moment and consider the Grim Reaper.

Consider this an invitation to reflect upon Death for the month of October. Please share your reflections here.

My idea of death came from when i was blowing bubbles (yes real bubbles not a bong) earlier this summer. When you blow a bubble you take air particles and put them all togther inside the bubble, now lets say the bubble is the body and the air is the soul. Many different particles are forced togther inside the bubble, once it pops the air is re-dispursed ready to be used again in any combination.

So thats how I have been looking at death for a while, your soul gets absorbed into all the other souls, and bits are reformed with other bits of soul to be captured inside a body.

Interestingly, it is not winter that really makes me think of death. I remember T.S. Elliot’s line from the very beginning of the Wasteland:

Although we often see it as a time of regeneration, if we are stagnating or someone we know dies, it is cruelly ironic.

Here, April is when the last of the snow is usually gone, even in the deepest parts of the woods. So, you finally get to see everything that was buried during the winter. That often leads one to reflect on death, for all sorts of reasons.
For me, Death is the rule that makes life a game. I don’t spend so much time worried about what comes after it, or what it means, only that everything I want to accomplish has to get done before it happens.

I knocked on the door gingerly, not knowing whether I meant it. It was more out of politeness really since the occupant of that shady room was in the throes of death. His name was Günther and I knew him for just over three years. He was someone who knew everybody and who could tell a story at a nod. He already knew enough about me that he could entertain people with it. He was a good man, somewhat delicate and prone to fear, but he would help anybody. Just the type of man you need as a janitor in an old peoples home. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of a deep lying anxiety and he knew I saw it, but he smiled a little embarrassed and said, “You know…”

Lying in the bed and breathing hard, he is hardly the man I had come to know when I started work at the Care Home. It was the discrete smile and sparkle in his eye that made you listen to his tenor voice, singing as he spoke. He had a suave hairstyle decently grey, combed back and always in place. Now his hair was short, cropped because of the Chemo-Therapy, and his face was pale. Each breath was into the depth of his lungs, almost mechanical, through tightly pressed dry lips. Every now and again he would cry out short scraps of words, mostly “Mama”. He would open one eye brusquely and then fall back into trouble sleep, breathing like a locomotive, as though he was in a hurry to get somewhere.

He had come to die. He had chosen our home, despite the reservations that the Care Staff had voiced, because he was part of our institution. He had worked here until he was sixty-four and he had continued to work here five years after reaching his pension. He was even on the committee for a while. Each Friday he accompanied the residents and guests to the Church service, joking along the way, greeting all and sundry. On Wednesdays he entertained the residents at a gossip-meeting, and boy, could he gossip. When he was told the terminal diagnosis, he immediately made plans to come to us.

His fear seized him at times, and he grabbed for straws, trying to pull himself out of the quagmire he had been sucked into. He clamped onto people who visited him, almost refusing to let them go, until reason loosened his grip and he told them, “till next time,” adamantly holding on. Günther liked living and the prospect of an unknown heaven didn’t make his death any easier. It was a path he had to go down alone, and he had so loved his wife. I think it was the task of going alone that was so daunting for him. He spoke seldom about death, except with our Lady Pastor, who was also a friend.

As I watched him lying there, I thought about the 22nd Psalm. “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me…” and asked myself whether he would have wanted to hear that Psalm then. Would I want to hear such words in his position? But the truth of those words seemed clear to me at his deathbed. He called out every now and again and God seemed far off and holy, far removed from the room which most of us passed by, reluctant to be confronted with death. The question has been voiced, whether Günther was a believer, and whether he can find consolation in his faith. He hung on to a wooden cross as though his life depended upon it.

The Psalmist turns his vision towards his childhood and just as he didn’t choose his mother, he hadn’t chosen his God. Surrounded by fearful images, he throws himself into the arms of God and begs him to remain close – to be there. Perhaps by calling “Mama” Günther was calling for the only source of consolation he had experienced, though she had left him. He meant the Archetype of solace, the One who is there. Even though we have the tendency to run off, discovering the world, like we did with our own Mothers, this Eternal Father is the One who is there.

The One who has wordless communion with us; who is in our midst, even then when, like Günther, we are poured out like waters, and all our bones are spread apart; our heart is like wax; and melted in the midst of our bowels. When our strength is dried up like a potsherd; and our tongue clings to our jaw. And it may have been my hand that reached out to calm him, but it was the Spirit of God that brought us together, and is near to both of us, if we allow him to be.

Meister Eckhardt said, “If we are troubled by the thought that we are far from God, let us find consolation in the fact that God is close to us.”

The Psalmist finally finds consolation and speaks the words, “You have answered me.” Perhaps this is the answer that Günther found as his breathing finally calmed, his fear subsided, and his last breath expired.

30.9.2005

Thank you Bob. You bring a close-up perspective that few of us can match.

Whlie talking about this subject I was pointed to this poem, which I wanted to share here:

I’ve watched and thought about this thread for the last several days, and I’ve come to the conclusion that death isn’t about the grim reaper for those who choose life. Rather, death is the conclusion of having lived. It is the final celebration of life. Fall is truly my favorite time of year. As I watch the leaves begin to turn and fall, the flowers that have produced seed for coming generations, the bountiful fruits of summer’s extravegance, I am reminded that each season is part of the integral cycle of bringing life forth, and seeing it’s return to the earth from which it came. To watch this cycle, year after year, is the confirmation that death is the beginning of life once again…

JT

Sydon,

In so far as your “bubble” allegory goes, I think I agree with it. Using the same allegory, I would elaborate and say that the air inside the bubble is non-different than the air outside, or the air that is in every other bubble. It’s all the same, just circumscribed for a time.

Put another way, particular souls melt back into the Universal Soul - though in a manner of speaking, they never “left” to begin with…but for a time, a form, which we call a man, “was” - and it subsisted in that air. But the form was temporary, part of a complex chain of causes.

Using the same word “soul” in a different way, I’d say that “souls” (the “mental” aspect of man, for lack of a better term) as many understand them (the mind, our memories, habits, etc.) are different from the “cosmic soul” which is a part of us all. The ego (which many call “soul”) changes throughout a life time - and just as it “was not” at one point, it will (barring something I am totally unaware of) also pass out of existance. It, just like the body, is “form”. This is why I reject mind/body dualism.