Bishops Letters
March 08 +James The Art of Dying
Western society is ‘death denying’ and many younger people have never seen a dead body. Talk of death conjures up all sorts of primitive fears – of everything from the unknown to pain, and from loneliness to corruption and decay. We all know that one day we shall surely die; but like Woody Allen, we don’t want to achieve immortality through hard work and success. We want to achieve it by not dying.
How things have changed! In the 16th and 17th centuries, surrounded as they were by pox, pestilence and war, people talked often about death and were keen to acquire the art of dying well. Theologians such as Jeremy Taylor made it clear that a ‘good death’ required a lifetime’s preparation. The art of dying well was living well.
That’s a prescription which hasn’t changed at all. Socrates knew it. When one of his disciples (in 399 B.C.) lamented that his master was about to die an innocent man, Socrates asked ‘Would you prefer me to die a guilty man?’ Some 2,400 years later Harry Secombe knew it too. I remember meeting him fairly soon before he died. He was a shadow of his former self, but as cheerful as ever; and he was especially amused by a telegram he received from his old good friend Spike Milligan which read ‘I hope you die before me. I couldn’t bear to have you singing at my funeral’.
The author Brendan Behan (who died in 1964) was also able to laugh about death. ‘When I came back to Dublin’ he wrote, ‘I was court-martialled in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence’! That sort of humour doesn’t for one moment ignore the gravity of death, or the agony of bereavement. It accepts that death is, as the Bible puts it, the ‘last enemy’ which challenges all our ambitions and aspirations and achievements. But it faces up to the fact that life is, as Karl Rahner observed, a process of dying; and acknowledges that each day ‘in the midst of life, we are in death’. The untimely death of friends, relatives and neighbours constantly reinforces an awareness of our own mortality; and films such as ‘Open Water’ (about a young couple adrift in the ocean) serve to remind us how suddenly our lives can be overturned and ended through no particular fault of our own.
That’s why ‘living well’ so as to die well means (among other things) an active acceptance of death rather than just negative resignation. St Francis talked of ‘Sister Death’, echoing St Paul who regarded death as ‘gain’. Both knew that there is a real sense in which death means liberation.
It is liberation first from the unknown and transient (this life) into the known and secure (rather than vice versa). It also involves liberation of perspective. When we’re dead – we shall see things clearly at last and ‘know as we are known’. Third, it means liberation from all the suffering and pain of this life, and is the ultimate form of healing. As we let go of this life and go home to God, we become the ‘whole’ people God created us to be. No wonder Martin Luther King’s epitaph read simply ‘Free at last’!
The atheist Jean-Paul Sartre believed that death empties life of meaning. Heidegger knew better. ‘In death’ he once said, ‘we find life’s meaning’. So perhaps a recent notice in a school magazine was more apt than its author realised. ‘We welcome news of Old Boys’ it read, ‘particularly those who have died’.
