Consider death for a moment. Americans have this tendency to view death as tragic without really thinking about why we shake our heads and make that soft clucking sound in the back of our throats while our eyes refuse to light anywhere because actually making eye contact might force us to acknowledge another human being’s raw feelings.
I think that a lot of times someone’s death is seen as tragic because we dwell on the cessation of the deceased’s experiences – that the 16 year-old killed in the car accident will never grow up to find love and live a a full life; that the child died before she got a chance to mature; that the middle aged woman will never see her kids grow up to do all of those things that we expect parents to be proud kids do (Random question: How come no one ever says “Thank God Linda died of cancer before she could see little Billy become a junkie with AIDS?” ’cause not every kid is going to grow up to be president and sometimes that’s pretty damn obvious…but I digress).
We fail to realize that death is the natural end of the cycle. Jim Morrison may have been a narcissistic lush but never a truer line was written than “no one here gets out alive.” Or, as Chuck Palahniuk wrote, “On a long enough time line the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” And while I’m not saying it’s wrong to grieve the deceased’s lost experiences, there is an unspoken thread there, a fear so primal that I think it takes years, if ever, before any of us realize that it’s there.
Though I was first introduced to it as a concept of Judaism it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that other religions incorporate the idea that a loved one isn’t really gone as long as she’s remembered by someone still living. It’s a comforting concept that just by cherishing your loved one’s memory you carry a little piece of that person around with you for as long as you live anyway. In many ways it mirrors the reality of our experiences; the people we care for, whether we loved them or hated them, influence our decision making processes and our outlook on life in ways many of us don’t understand and most of us don’t bother to investigate. Sure, it’s obvious when someone has daddy’s eyes or mommy’s chin or when you suddenly look in the mirror at 50 and realize that you’ve got the same sagging jowls as your paternal uncle, but the influence someone can have on the way with think and act reaches far deeper than that.
And if you’re at all aware of that influence, it’s quite likely you find yourself wondering just how that person would react to something. When it’s someone you loved there’s a little bittersweet wave of sadness when you come upon something she would have enjoyed. When it’s someone you loathed there’s often a feeling of self-righteous indignation that manifests itself in that “ha! showed you dad, didn’t I?” strain that is so common in American culture.
My Grandmother died at 79 years old and I bet I’m the only one of her grandchildren who ever got to hear the story about her and her roommates splurging a month’s salary in 1939 to buy a piano so they’d have something to do in the evenings in their tiny little fourth floor walk-up in downtown DC (the story about the piano men delivering it is something that still makes me grin 25 years after hearing it). Thing is, even though I heard that story, even though I could tell my cousins that story, the essence of the experience is at best diluted.
The unspoken, unacknowledged fear is the one that stems out the real tragedy of death: that we might have no idea how someone would react because we didn’t really know them well enough to begin with. Once that person we cared for is gone not only is all of their first-hand knowledge and experience lost we have squandered the opportunity to dig deep, to get the stories that make that person worth knowing and loving, to absorb the sum of their experiences and attitudes in a way that allows us to truly know someone. We count on having time to do this and even if someone is lucky enough to have a “natural” lifespan we often don’t.
The real tragedy of death is that we squander the time we have with the people we love on fripperies and effluvia. I’m not saying that every moment spent with someone you care for has to be packed with meaning, full of discovery and knowledge sharing. That would be too hard (after all, sometimes you just have to talk about the designated hitter rule). But maybe we need to find a balance, to find a way not to try and pack so much meaning into someone’s last weeks, days, or hours so that the actual process of dying might be a little easier on the person who is doing it.
My uncle would have been 63 today and I have no idea what he’d think about the state of the world right now. I wish I did.
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