Living With the End in Mind
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
––Haruki Murakami
In modern society we have a tendency to see death as something that ought to be defeated, as though it stands in direct opposition to life. In compensation we strive to lead relatively undisturbed lives and when this doesn’t happen, we are often left feeling as though we have failed . . . or that life has failed us.
The education of my heart in this regard began when I was a child in the summer of my thirteenth year; the year my father left our family and never came back. My father, although far from a saint, had always been affectionate towards me, and proud of me. I was good at sports, especially horseback riding, and I think he identified with the skill and courage I demonstrated in those areas.
My mother had always had an antagonistic relationship with her sister, and never thought well of her own sex, so a daughter budding into womanhood who promised to be as attractive, as she was herself, resulted in an increasing degree of ambivalence toward her daughter. Consequently, a previously affectionate relationship became an increasingly difficult and tricky one to navigate, particularly as time progressed. Needless to say, as a child I was deeply hurt and confused.
Added to this was the fact that my mother’s anger and distress at losing her husband was intense, so a hunt ensued almost immediately for an alternate which, in time, she secured, but whose terms dictated that all but one of her four children be housed elsewhere, including me.
As a child, I never really lived at home again. I stayed at a friend’s house, and then another friend’s house, and another, till I was old enough to go to university.
Not too much later, in my early twenties, I was diagnosed with a brain tumour which was removed, and recurred, five years later. This was yet another shock to the system that altered my life in ways I could not have anticipated.
The second surgery resulted in motor function problems in my left side which was devastating as I’d led an active, athletic life prior, and had been training for biathlon when I was first diagnosed.
It was the recurrent tumour, and the medical trauma surrounding that event, that finally woke me up to some key facts of life:
Nothing is certain.
Suffering the bad luck of a brain tumour wasn’t personal, or unfair.
Our mortality (in all its guises) is a given.
Nothing is certain. In other words, God, Life, the Universe––however one thinks of this––has made us no promises. Life is both wondrously, and unsettlingly, open-ended. We don’t really get to choose how things turn out. Each small move we make builds one upon another leading who knows where in the end. I have learned both to cherish the sense of freedom I derive from this situation, and to have greater respect and gratitude for the privilege of being alive at all.
Suffering the bad luck of a brain tumour wasn’t personal, or unfair. This one took a while. In the beginning it felt very personal and very wrong to be denied the privilege and pleasure of being able-bodied with all the advantages that state of being makes possible. It only gradually dawned on me that, although the tumour didn’t seem fair or right to me, it wasn’t really wrong either; there was nothing personal in it. It just was.
So, I stopped arguing against the nature of things, bowed to what was, and started being more curious about things instead. Thus, I made a decision to keep an open mind to see if I could salvage something useful, or beautiful from the ruins of the new place in which I found myself.
Our mortality is a given. All the losses I have mentioned were essentially envoys of death one way or another. My father leaving and never returning; the death of family solidarity. Becoming a young woman; the death of a relatively steady and affectionate relationship with my mother. And two brain tumours (with the threat of further recurrence); the death of any certainty where the future of my life was concerned.
There is no question in my mind at this point, the autumn of my fifty-ninth year, that death is not an aberration, but an experience that is undeniably and foundationally human.
And that’s okay, I’m at peace with that.
I think in our rush towards technological progress and ever more comfortable and convenient ways of living, we have forgotten that our mortality is very much baked into the natural order of things. And it will not be enough to simply intellectually acknowledge our mortality as a very organic, holistic part of the whole cycle of life; it must also be deeply felt. In order for this to happen we must learn to let death, loss and grief do their work on us.
Practices such as gardening and forest bathing, among others, can be helpful in re-establishing and deepening our connection with the natural order of things. They help ground us as we learn to befriend our dark nights of the soul with patience, love, courage and deeper sense of connection to the whole cycle of life, and not just the bits we may prefer.
For me, this humanizes and naturalizes experiences of death, loss and grief; a shift in perspective which is generous in holding the possibility for normalizing conversations about mortality, linking them helpfully with a greater sense of wholeness and belonging to something larger than one’s self.
Death not experienced as failure or morbid inconvenience, but simply a rich beautiful and challenging part of being alive in the world––an education of the heart.
Was any of this easy? No.
A willingness to lean into what was difficult and face reality, one small step at a time, was an absolute necessity. It was instrumental, in fact, in helping me to learn that not every loss I suffered, need be taken as a tragedy.
For, is it not while deeply rooted in the dark, messy, paradoxically fecund material, that all beauty in life emerges and unfolds?
Love and courage.