Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Some years ago, a friend was facing the birth of her first child. While happy that she was soon to be a mother, she confessed openly her fears about the actual birth-process, the pain, the dangers, the unknown. But she consoled herself with the thought that hundreds of millions of women have experienced giving birth and managed it. Surely, she felt she could manage it too.
I sometimes take those words and apply them to the prospect of dying. Death is the most daunting, unsettling, and heaviest topic there is, our occasional false bravado notwithstanding. When we say that we are not afraid of dying, mostly we’re whistling in the dark and, even there, the tune comes out easier when our own death remains still an abstract idea, something in the indefinite future. Full disclosure, my own thoughts about dying no doubt fit that description, whistling in the dark. But why not? Surely whistling in the dark is better than torturing ourselves with unnecessary fear.
Courage
And so, I employ my friend’s methodology for steeling her courage in the face of having to give birth and face that unknown. Simply put, millions and millions of people have managed the process of dying, so I should be able to manage it too! Moreover, unlike giving birth to a child, which affects less than half the human race, in the case of dying, everyone, including myself, is going to have to manage it. A hundred years from now, everyone reading these words will have had to manage his or her death.
So, here’s a way to look at our own death: Billions and billions of people have managed this, men, women, children, even babies. Some were old, some were young; some were prepared, some were not; some welcomed it, some met it with bitter resistance; some died from natural causes, some died through violence; some died surrounded by love, some died alone without any human love surrounding them; some died peacefully, some died crying out in fear; some died at a ripe old age, some died in the prime of their youth; some suffered for years from a seemingly meaningless dementia with those around them wondering why God and nature seemed cruel in keeping them alive; others in robust physical health with seemingly everything to live for, took their own lives; some died full of faith and hope, and some died feeling only darkness and despair; some died breathing out gratitude, and some died breathing out resentment; some died in the embrace of religion and their churches, some died completely outside of that embrace; and some died like Mother Teresa, while others died like Hitler. But every one of them somehow managed it, the great unknown, the greatest of all unknowns. It seems it can be managed.
Experience
Moreover, nobody has come back from the other world with horror stories about dying which suggests that all our horror movies about being tormented after death and ghosts and haunted houses are pure fiction, through and through.
Most people, I suspect, have the same experience that I have when I think about the dead, particularly about persons I have known who have died. The initial grief and sadness of their loss eventually wears off and is replaced by an inchoate sense that it’s alright, that they are alright, and that death has in some strange way washed things clean. In the end, we have a pretty good feeling about our dead loved ones and about the dead in general, even if their departure from this earth was far from ideal, as for instance if they died angry, or through immaturity, or because they committed a crime, or by suicide. Somehow it eventually all washes clean and what remains is the inchoate sense, a solid intuition, that wherever they are now, they are in better and safer hands than our own.
When I was a young seminarian we once had to translate Cicero’s treatise on aging and dying from Latin into English. I was nineteen years old at the time, but was very taken by Cicero’s thoughts on why we shouldn’t fear death. He was a renowned stoic; but, in the end, his lack of fear of dying was a little like my friend’s approach to giving birth, that is, given how universal it is, we should be able to manage it!
Faith
I’ve long since lost my undergraduate notes on Cicero, so I looked up the treatise on the Internet recently. Here’s a nugget from that treatise: “Death should be held of no account! For clearly the impact of death is negligible if it annihilates the soul, or even desirable, if it conducts the soul to some place where it is to live forever. What, then, shall I fear, if after death I am destined to be either not unhappy or happy?”
Our faith tells us that, given the love and benevolence of the God we believe in, only the second option, happiness, awaits us. And we already intuit that.