Living With the End in Mind
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, so when the inevitable happens we are often left feeling as though we have failed . . . or that life has failed us.
The beginning of my life’s descent into chaos, 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.
Complicating this, was the fact that 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 my mother’s anger and distress at losing her husband, which 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 endings one way or another. My father leaving and never returning; the unexpected end of family solidarity. Becoming a young woman; the unexpected end of a relatively steady and affectionate relationship with my mother. And two brain tumours (with the threat of further recurrence); the unexpected end of any certainty where the future of my life was concerned. Our mortality is simply another kind of ending, the advantage here is that we can anticipate this one.
Life is full of beginnings and endings: ebbing and flowing, coming and going, appearance and disappearance, birth and death . . .
So, our mortality is not an aberration, but an expression that is undeniably a natural part of Life. Nevertheless, it’s taken me years to come to relative peace with that, and it’s a daily practice Our fear of the unknown seems to be a very primal fear indeed.
I think in our rush towards technological progress and ever more comfortable and convenient ways of living, we have forgotten that being mortal is very much baked into the natural order of things. For me, this observation 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, yet challenging part of being alive in the world––in the words of Haruki Murakami, “[…] not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
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.
What does all of this mean?
Some unfortunate things happened to me when I was very young that no one should have to face, yet I did have to face them. All of those dark experiences were fodder for seeds sprouting into seedlings, which grew into the unfolding of a new life that ultimately blossomed into something surprisingly satisfying.
I’ve learned a lot from my suffering. It’s made it easier to identify with other people’s losses and sorrows, and strengthened a tendency towards being empathic and compassionate. Ultimately, it has led to insights that have deepened both my engagement with, and appreciation for ordinary life––the morning light as it graces the wall every morning as I’m enjoying my ritual cup of tea, the sound of the birds outside my window in the trees close to my apartment, and sitting outside the local cafe in the autumn sunshine chatting with my son when he visits.
The beauty of such quiet joys can easily be missed. Suffering has been an ally in making me more alive to them. And while I would never wish suffering on myself, nor anyone else, I wouldn’t trade in the feeling of being deeply, more viscerally, and pervasively alive either. Life is full of paradox.
Now, I don’t have all the answers to life’s travails, and I don’t feel anymore like I need to, but one thing I know is this––it is of critical importance to care. Caring is the foundation for everything else: caring enough to get up and try again when you fall, caring enough to travel more slowly so that you don’t miss the beauty of the morning light, and last, but not least, caring enough to be a little more curious about the Life within yourself.
Love and courage.