Some things about death are final, most significantly that once gone a loved one will never be seen again. This departure can feel quite unreal, and I keep half expecting my late wife to pop in the front door and once again say “Hi Honey. I’m home.” It won’t happen, but that doesn’t stop my imagination from conjuring it up. After 50 years together, old habits are hard to break.
There’s a lot of things I tell myself to try to make myself feel better and just as many that I’m told by others, but none of them change the finality of death and that I will never see my wife again. She’s gone.
At once most ordinary and most extraordinary, we don’t like to think about death and certainly avoid talking about it. Some of us plan for it, prepare wills, trusts, medical powers of attorney, and lists of people to notify, but not all. The doctor in the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit expressed appreciation that my wife and I had made a plan, and said most of the people he sees hadn’t.
Life and death are two sides of a coin. At some juncture we still do not fully understand, chemistry becomes biology; lifeless chemicals and minerals become living systems, reversing entropy for a little while. This may be commonplace within the universe, although we’ve yet to discover life anyplace else other than here on Earth.
As Bob Dylan wrote and sang, “he not busy being born is busy dying.” It’s true; life will kill you. This fact underlies the naming of Aimée Thanatogenos in Evelyn Waugh’s book The Loved One; her last name literally means “Amy born dead.” So it is for us all.
In the Buddhist Heart Sutra, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Avalokiteshvara explains “there is no birth and no cessation.” In his exposition on emptiness, Avalokiteshvara, whose name means “the one whose gaze upon the suffering of the world never wavers,” negates all positive assertions about being and the self. The sutra culminates with the Sanskrit Mantra “Gate. Gate. Paragate. Parasamgate;” “Gone. Gone. Gone Beyond. Completely Gone Beyond.” The Buddha adds his two cents, “Thus it is.”
These truths notwithstanding, pretentions to immortality comfort many and remain powerful. Living is such an immersive experience that belief in a human-like afterlife in heaven or the underworld is easier for some than accepting the idea that when an individual life is over, it’s done.
Today, high-tech billionaires are seeking immortality. Peter Theil and others envision a transhuman future where human consciousness evolves into digital form and they can live forever. So powerful is the allure that such ideas underlie the profits of mass entertainment in the form of books, movies and video games. It’s not all rosy, however, and includes a future of malevolent machines, Zombies, Vampires, and other forms of the living dead. We may not like to talk about it, but imagining life after death entertains us.
No matter how many wise words I’ve read and have been told, the death of my wife still feels unreal. Dreams of her, strangely, seem more real and normal; clearly, my awake self can’t yet wrap its mind around her death. Perhaps it never will; we’ll see.
My granddaughter says it’s good to miss my wife. “It keeps her spirit alive,” she advises. Wise words from a young lady, and I’m having no trouble doing it.
