PENTECOST 2007 SPECIAL EDITION

ISSUE 10 - ISSN 1448 - 6326

Is Death the ultimate trip? A Personal refection on Death...

In memory of those who have taken the journey…….and those who are left behind.

Peter Blakey

 

Reflection is a mighty tool, coming into play at moments when you least expect - as in times of death with its attendant grief, loss and confusion. The spiritual mystery of its presence bewilders and unnerves me, time and again. That, that was alive, is now a mass of flesh and bones, inert and unmoving.

"Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to …"(Hamlet Act V, 1) and now lie with you, as still as silence itself. Were have you gone, and maybe even, why did you go? Or have to go, as the case may have been? Death is not limited to the loss of life, but the going out of life of many things. For change itself represents a death of the concepts and realities of the former, and in so doing challenges the known personal and spiritual reality in which we believe we exist. Addressing this challenge to the essential and spiritual self, must be more than just a reality check. For it to be of benefit it adds to the stock of the understanding of the spiritual essence of being.

In this reflection on my grief, I accept that grief is may not be a finite experience, but something that comes unheeded and unacknowledged, resting in the soul and mind at uncalled for moments. The challenges this presented were made more intense in that the feelings were, I found, really outside any control. The more intense and challenging the grief, the greater there is the sense of isolation and need to communicate with something other than my immediate environment.

The sense of loss that occurs on the death of a parent or the separation of a loved one is a challenge to the core spiritual understandings that are part of the personal self. In a Christian setting, the sense of isolation is overwhelming - where was God when this happened? If God so loved the world……why was this (whatever) allowed to occur? And with a Lear-like rage against in the elements, as the bereaved wanders through the raging storm of their swirling emotions of unimaginable loss, the compounding anger, and that intense sense of frustration that comes when the realisation of total impotence. Where was our Savour God at this time of need?

These experiences can shake to the very core of physical existence. The physical sense of what death actually is can never be really prepared for. The sense of incomprehension is almost tangible - as I experienced watching, through a crack in doorway, and for just a moment. A colleague suffering an inoperable brain tumour as I believe - seeing her, as afar, lying with her head in bandages, silent and at peace, last rites being said, and life oozing from her very presence - and I dare not go in. Or sitting on my bike, as a school boy, waiting with friends as one of our number's father was having his last rites - with cancer soon to claim another soul.

We weren't even conscious of the drama of which we were but mere bit players - clowns to our adult Hamlet. Were we aware of this Yorrick, lying there in a checked dressing gown with some remote figure saying things that he may have barely believed?

The spiritual appreciation of the event was something for adults - when I was young. This was seen as very much a physical fact first, and explained in spiritual terms in the process of the fact being acknowledged. Death was something for the news, someone else and then in another country - and something that we young people should not worry about. Death was not of childish things and for adults - people who were old enough to know about these things - to explain and address. Ah, the certainty of youth - and how it becomes disillusioned with age.

Where was God in Belsen, or at the Rookwood Cemetery Crematorium when a victim of asbestosis was provided with service to which this Sydney institution is justly known? And as we carried out his coffin, we all were thankful that we hadn't worked at that site where the crumbling asbestos had been wafting like a fine mist on the breeze? Just next door, nearby, Location, Location - and just being in the wrong place, long enough at the wrong time. If there is a God of love, why should someone die in a manner that befalls those with asbestosis?

No compensation for being at the wrong place at the wrong time - as many Jews, Gipsies and so on were, when the Gas ovens were lit in that part of hell that we only can visit now when visiting Poland and Eastern Germany. God, Allah or even Yaweh may be prayed to when the body into the large hole, or goes behind the curtain, or wherever, but to what end. God's presence in death, whether it is physical in fact, or emotional as relationships die and are consumed by that sense of that special loss which comes when the life that was, is no longer. The feelings that are expressed at funeral and the declaration of a decree nisi, may be indistinguishable - nobody is enjoying this, deep down inside.

And when death comes, as it does - who may grieve. Do we deny all those who the deceased, the right to shed tears? Or is it more that as each of us address the situation, as in this change in our physical and social existence, grief becomes an expression of our relationship with the that individual. Western traditions may have it that as a mark of respect, men are reserved and hold their emotions in place. Close relatives may express public grief, but those in the outer rim of that community are constrained in how they may react. Attending the cremations of parents-in-law found me holding my feeling inside me, and being strong. Uncertain of how I should react, this was my first conscious confrontation of what it was to die, and be cremated. As my partner's father's coffin slowly rolled behind the crematorium curtain the grief well up and burst, no one and nothing could staunch the flow of tears. Emotions expressed as only the human being may, without rationality or understanding - for he is dead, her rock, her father and constant source of assurance. The sense of loss immeasurable, the grief and sorrow - personal and very unimagined. What was I to do, did I have the right to shed tears for someone I barely knew, and knew me even less. She joined him, dead six months or more, after this. This was where I had no chance to rationalise the grief, and my rights in this matter. For good or ill, this was a person whom I loved, whatever that meant, and this despite being separated from her.

For me, it was where I first really confronted grief - and the effects on my life that this event had. Yes, we'd had spoken about the possibility of her dying a week before it happened. As an alcoholic, she was prone to occasionally do things that were designed to shock - part of the addict's survival strategies - suck them in, and take the focus off you, so you can retreat to the safety of the bottle and the needle.

I was listening, agreeing passively and yet not believing - she would survive. This was a truce between factions - we were speaking as we’d spoken once, in love and not in spite, and yet our wounds were just below the surface. I was being trusted with a task, as she once had to her late father. And to-morrow was another day.

We had already had the grief of separation, which had been its own type of death. However we'd remained civil to each other - there were the children - her children and not mine. Time had allowed me to become a surrogate - to lean on for support and the occasional child minding. But we would never get back together. My day of tearful realisation - as she planned to move and take the children with her - did more to steel me against any expression of emotion than all the bullies and traumas, of my past could or would do. I would survive - an example of being my father's son. I found out that he too used this to protect himself against things he could not control or address - we were different, unique and vulnerable - and despite our capacities to rationalise and justify, we never understood why this had to be.

On hearing the news of her death, I knew what to do. I would organise the children, and I'd then go and identify the body at the Morgue. Yes, we had to focus on the now, and leave emotions behind. They would be addressed later. And then the dam burst - I stood and suddenly felt totally alone - and broke down in floods of tears. I was now experiencing the adult dark night of my soul, and I didn't know what to do. I stood looking at my friend, herself in tears, and couldn't move. All the anger, resentment and fury that I'd suppressed in my life came out in one horrendous mass of uncontrolled emotion.

We were separated, shared the children - but the certainty of our existence - in my mind - made this situation something of which I had little comprehension on capacity to control. Until this time, in most matters involving my emotions, I had developed a vice like control - they (whoever they were) would not hurt me - I would survive.

And yet the emotions pressed in on me, in a tsunami-like torrent. I was powerless to do anything other that ride out the storm- like Romeo on finding Juliet, she was gone, and there was nothing I could do about it.

For a while I was alone with my grief, with no one capable or being allowed to come near me. I wouldn’t let them, and more correctly didn't know how to ask, for I was in battle for my very being. I was experiencing and denying its existence, in a perverse sense of duality. If nothing else I would deal with this situation - the Grief is something that must go - I thought. I will get over this - I thought.

What I felt was consigned to the wilderness, and hidden under mountains of activities and work. I had thee children to feed, clothe, protect, and to share a life with. But I was in full-scale survival mode - however I would succeed in this challenge to which I had promised and saw as my sacred duty. I was alone, I believed, and requiring to be a master of the destiny that I believed was before me. God, let alone any sense of the spiritual, was treated with a degree of lip service - for I was busy. Those little luxuries would be sort out later - I thought.

In addressing this matter of emotional break down with all the rational weapons I had at my command, I had no time to ask God, Shiva, or Buddha or any of my other sources of spiritual understanding for anything.

As when she decided to leave, armed with the children, my mind was full of chatter that would not allow it to meditate and focus on the Self within. Had my ego imposed upon my a task that would have daunted the great Greek hero, Hercules and make his twelve labours seem like an afternoon's work? And what was God or whosever was on hand, at the time - supposed to do? What was I asking for - a return to the status quo? Not really - the children and I (one girl and two boys) were left to confront things as they were, and not what was. Life - as it is said, goes on - for those who are alive.

We parted finally, as she lay 'in state' at the mortuary whilst the official cause of death was determined. She was at peace, perhaps within a space that she was not entirely happy with, her soul ready to move onto another body, as it worked its way along to total and perfect realisation. Was this just ceasing to be - the body decomposes and the soul and spirit, or as the physical form lay - eyes closed, was the spirit moving to another space, to experience and learn, with a view to achieving perfection?

She still comes to me in moments of grief and torment, and smiles. I imagine she is now with her mother, and along with her mother's sister, who was buried a few rows up, are sitting on the tombstones, complaining about the view from the cemetery. This would only be when the Aunt and she weren't ganging up on her mother. The visits are less frequent, although the memory is still with me - particularly that hauntingly luminous smile.

Grief is both personal and its manifestation reflects as much on the grieved and those who grieve. How much do you really mean to me - you who have departed and moved on? Social proximity and emotional preservation deny us the 'right' to share with those who die, as part of the on-going world death toll. In so doing we deny ourselves the sense of closure or definition of what this person meant to the existence we are a part of.

There is only so much of individual emotion to go around - and yet, as has been stated, grief, is a personal experience. I can, for instance shed tears for the Rev Martin Luther King, when seeing that clip of his "I have a dream" speech. That moment reflecting on more on the possibilities of humanity, rather than outcomes. Its my grief at the loss of this person and what that point of time and space was to me, not anything more - part of the story or song line of this point our journey through this existence.

As part of the grieving process - may come guilt. In an attempt to control the situation we ask, "what didn't we do to prevent this happening?" as if it was a personal act that caused this to happen. 

Guilt, in whatever form it takes, then maybe enhanced by the sense of loss. But what have you lost? Was it motive or opportunity - to preserve the sanity of one whose dementia had been fuelled by consumption, to resolve the various outstanding issues that fathers have with their sons? Parting words to the effect of "I'm sorry I wasn't a good father' being responded to with "You were OK, Dad. You did the best you could." May this was to place a line under the past, and go in part, to resolve many matters that are now etched into the psyche of the child, now adult.

I remember my last two visits to my father's bedside - first with him unconscious, puffing like an old steam locomotive - toothless and nothing more than skin and bones, and the second, same room but with his soul and spirit no more. Was this the man of whom I had been in awe - the mind that functioned so forensically on many problems, and yet was amazed at who his family had become?

As the Parish Priest noted at his memorial service, my father wasn't into charismatic experiences, largely as the effects of them were unable to be objectively tested. Faith and belief, per se, were not part of his world-view - and this had given him a decidedly negative view of the world. His daughter would occasionally call him 'Eye-ore" after A.A.Milne's donkey - another called him a 'perpetual glum. His pragmatic mind over time had taught him to expect the worst and know that it wouldn't be a disappointment when it came. Would he agree with late Kerry Bulmore Packer's observations on the 'here after', or would he seek further research on the subject? I may even ask him, should I see him next.

So death - both the social and physical - is a challenge. The landscape of the human existence is asked to accept this radical re-arrangement of its immediate reality and told by some that this is part of the circle of life - the great grand father dies, and in little while the great-grand daughter is born. Does this ray of sunshine blot out the loss of the presence that was the peak of the human social landscape that was a family - however extended? 

My observations are personal and in doing this, I am trying to explain how the spiritual has been a part of this process. God, the Spirit moving on and other matters being briefly discussed - and what is most common in all of these after events is the deafening silence as each of those present, voluntarily, or involuntarily reflects on what has happened.

For our arrival and our departure are as much a matter of circumstance as choice, depending on who or rather what you believe - for as you live, so you may die. And what would you do, if you could avoid it? Jonathan Swift, in his legendary "Gulliver's Travels" railed furiously against the enforced prolonging of life and the desire for physical immortality.

His chosen 'immortals' were imprisoned shells of humanity, unable to understand or communicate in the youthful society in which they inhabited, being weak and fragile and unable to relieved by death, they wallowed in their societally-inflicted immortality. Trapped in life they sat and waited perhaps in the forlorn hope that someone would commute the 'sentence'.

And yet they are venerated as being living treasures - if only they knew?

Does God feel like this, too? Is everlasting life all that's cracked up to be? God, particularly in the matter of death, it might be suggested, gets a rather hard time on a number of fronts. It would come from the personification of the deity and reflects how some perceive that which "passeth all understanding".

There is a basic first point in the business of belief - it represents an example of active choice. It could be said that God, however the concept is described from which spiritual tradition you choose, exists. The desire, or need, to believe in this come more from who have already chosen and need to feel a sense of community.

Belief in God covers a lot of unknown and imponderables - something that explains and can be given responsibility for matters over which we mere mortals have no control. The control that this belief and the subsequent expressions of this and its meaning, provides has become an ethical reference point western culture, with many of these elaborations cross cultural in their application.

The God of the Bible or the blessed name of the "Torah" spoke against death in terms of "thou shalt not kill", Jesus has revived Lazarus and 'rose on the third day' - so why must there be this death and its subsequent loss? Must there be death?

Given my assertion that belief is by choice, then death is part of the circle of life. God has little to do with it. The beliefs that come from a spiritual perspective may explain something, but they are more an attempted rationalisation on the unknown. Even if the noted ‘expert’, the late Kerry Packer, noted that there was nothing there - then what was he looking for? Given that there has been written on the subject by so many, who have never made the passage back, the comments may be seen as made by one who has.

So what does this mean? Death - in its many forms - is a physical fact. What happens after death, is largely governed by the spiritual understandings with which we choose to live our lives respecting and honouring. Many spiritual traditions have a respect for existence, and opposition to acts that threaten its existence as a corner stone of their beliefs. This may be an attempt to frame the situation so that reason may arise out of the incomprehensible.

Whether it’s the massacres in Dafur or Rwanda, or the loss of someone near and dear - and even knowing how and why - still doesn't remove the pain of the fact, nor explain into fact a logic that can only pay lip service to emotions that this brings. Prayer, reflection, self respect that reflects on all may work towards maintaining a link in the process which some call the 'circle of life'. Some may say that one's time is chosen for when death calls, and that's it. It may not be of our choosing, but it is as required - and the wheel of existence moves on and we may reappear in another form, taking something of the previous and building onto what we are to learn.

God and the various manifestations of that concept seem to be blamed for what is an inevitable event. We all were borne, we are allowed to die - and at times dignity is an optional extra. The time for change is as required by what we have learned and what we need to learn to become more with the spiritual than we were when we started out in this part of our universal existence.

What happens after that is open to conjecture, and no one has been that far there and come back to confirm or deny. The concept of the belief in God may provide comfort, and support, as profound spiritual understandings may. And things may occur that are beyond understanding, but as souls within the same basic space, being respectful to our Selves and reflecting that on others, may help prepare for what is part of the business of being.

However the experience is part of the journey and hopefully we will learn about ourselves on the way. As the circle is not broken - and our memory and our love may keep the best, ignore that which needs to be, and honour that which made the time important. Is death the Ultimate trip - well that's something only time and circumstance will determine? Whether there's heaven and hell, let alone nirvana or anything else is largely up to the set of spiritual beliefs that are part of the existence you developed.

Author:

Peter Blakey is a member of the Australian Catholic University Online Unit and an occasional contributor to the Ejournal.

 

Email: p.blakey@mcauley.acu.edu.au

 

© Copyright is retained by the author