Death Be Not Proud

Loving Mystery

I’m known in my family as the death man.

When my fascination? Preoccupation? With death annoys? spooks? Lacey, she’ll tell me her friends ask her, “How can you live with someone who’s so focused on dying?

My grandfather was the first close person to die. But he was encased in a beautiful mahogany casket, so I never saw his body.

I was a 26-year-old curate in a huge parish in Akron, Ohio, when I saw my first body.

The principal of Firestone High School – get it? Akron, rubber city, Firestone – had been caught embezzling, and killed himself.

I showed up for work one morning, and the rector, my boss, said, “The wake for him is this afternoon. I have a meeting in Cleveland I can’t miss. So, you’ll represent us.”

Why me? I was the rookie on the big staff.

But I wasn’t about to betray my anxiety.

When I showed up in my cark suit, with a clerical collar, the mourners all stepped aside, and made a path for me to the casket.

Which was open.

I had just enough training and instinct to know to kneel at the prayer desk in front of the coffin, look as if I was praying, while I became light-headed.

I was concentrated on not fainting.

I gave him a good look. I don’t remember whether I recognized him from church, but I don’t think I was able to consider much except how to carry off whatever the mourners expected of me.

What I remember, 60 years later, is that he didn’t look dead. Whatever dead was meant to look like.

I also remember that, as I looked at that body, I wondered where the man who had inhabited it, was now.

Although I have a strong rational streak in me, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that whatever essence, soul? had been the source of his life, had been snuffed out.

I understand why death can be so scary. Though at my age, much about it feels welcome.

Ego is relentless, insisting that we hang on, even when death has become the clear next thing.

I wonder if ego is born with us, or develops over time.

Birth, maybe the most unlikely occurrence, with the possible exception of the appearance of life itself on this unlikely planet, makes the embrace of mystery mandatory.

It may be a bit too woke to say that waking up every day is itself mysterious miracle enough, to convict us of miracle as what sustains us.

If in life, why not death?

An unfathomable miracle calls us into being. Keeps billions of cells coordinating to run things for our lifetime.

What, besides that pesky ego, keeps us from embracing the unfathomable mystery of dying? Which will embrace us in some way powerfully related to birth.

Siri, working with ChatGPT, says approximately 117 billion people have died. There are presently 8.3 billion people living. So, 13 times more people have died than are presently alive.

Seems like a monumental effort to evade and deny something that has made itself indelible, inevitable.

Trying to manage, rather than accept the powerful mystery, is like convincing ourselves that we were the author of our own life. Our birth.

Isn’t birth always hard, always requiring hard work, uncertainty?

Welcome to a way to let meddlesome ego step to the side.

Aren’t you glad you asked? Oh, you didn’t?