A Good Death

There is a wrongness about death that feels inescapable, as illogical as this is. The entire structure of the created world is that of decay and regeneration, and yet, the death of a human person feels like it must be avoided at all costs. We cannot accept it. Something about it feels unnatural, wrong, inhuman.

I am wondering if this has something to do with the fact that death must be faced alone. Unlike birth, in which the mother and infant together must face danger and risk to transition new life from womb to world, the passageway between death and the afterlife is a territory that must be walked alone.

I have stood at the deathbed of my grandfather and held my daughter in my arms as she was taken off of life support. I can say very clearly that I did not stand between my loved ones and death. My presence there did not make them less alone in what they were encountering.

Why is this, one might ask a benevolent Creator. Why create in such a way that it is impossible for us to enter the world alone and impossible for us to leave it except alone? It seems irrational. Theology’s answer to this is that death is wrong, unnatural, not part of the plan. Death is the result of choosing ourselves above others. Death is when the self becomes so important that the implicit teleology can only result in existential loneliness: the type of loneliness where we are so sure that ours was the right way, that we can reconstruct reality in our image, that we must be right, even if we are alone in our rightness. But this doesn’t stop us from trying to convince others of that rightness.

You could make this argument in the case of Eve not wanting to be alone in her choice and needing Adam to validate it for her. You could also argue that this is exactly what Lucifer does when he goes off determining that he knows better, can do better, and then spends the rest of his damned existence attempting to convince others, be it angels or humans, of his rightness. Satan’s loneliness began his damnation, but that same loneliness defines his damnation, and he cannot help dragging others into it, forever lighting a black torch of hope against the darkness that he engendered.

Last week, my father’s father died at the age of 91. His death was not unexpected, and it was as peaceful as could be managed given his state of health. All three of his children were with him in his last days and last hours. His wife was with him. He had a blessedly full life, two loving marriages, children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, a fulfilling career, a lifetime of travel and recognition for his work and his worth. He had what most people dream of for themselves, what many would consider a life well-lived. But for those closest to him, none of this makes his death easier to bear.

Like my mother’s father before him and like Lizzy, he faced his death alone, even surrounded as he was by those who loved him. His death brought home to those who loved him that nothing in their lives would ever be quite the same again. It forced his wife, his children, and his grandchildren to face up to their own mortality, and in doing so, to face the reality that his absence from the world makes existence just that much harder to bear.

It was like this for my maternal grandmother, who still passes the days as though in shadow, half-present in a world that no longer contains the man with whom she shared over fifty years of marriage, to whom she gave her body, her children, her love, and her life. For her, each breath without him carries a price. One day, the cost will be more than she can bear, and then her absence from this world will trigger the mortal fallout in her children, now required to face existence without either of their parents.

My father’s mother died when he was my age. With the passing of his father, my father is now an adult orphan. My father is a courageous, honorable, resourceful, and successful man in his sixties, and yet his voice on the phone–his picture through a computer–conveyed a fragility terrifying to his own adult children. My father was a son before he was a father. My father fixes our problems, stands between us and the darkness, fights to do the right thing in the face of criticism, condemnation, or insinuation. But he cannot fight death anymore than his children can stand in between him and his new orphanhood.

Death brings home to us the vastness of our own impotence. Death removes a loved one from this world, making it that much smaller and ourselves that much more lonely. Nothing and no one can fill the absence left by each exquisitely irreplaceable individual. The sheer inexorability of our own mortality sweeps over us like an ocean, reminding us that all the strength of spirit, will of mind, and courage of body cannot bring us gasping to the surface.

There is something irresolvably wrong about death, and I believe its wrongness lies in its relationship with loneliness. There is something so unavoidable about loneliness in this world, and I think much of our time is spent trying to run and hide from this loneliness. But no one can die for you; you must die, and you must die alone.

What, then, is meant by this term “a good death”? Is it even possible to bring goodness into something that is so intrinsically wrong? This seems counterintuitive, and yet it is also omnipresent. It was present in people such as Desmond Doss, who saved at least 75 wounded men, left for dead, on Hacksaw Ridge in Okinawa in 1945. It was present in Maximilian Kolbe, who offered his life in place of a married man with children in Auschwitz in 1941 and so died via injection with carbolic acid. And it was present, too, in the surgeons and residents who tried to save Lizzy’s life in April of 2019.

I recently read a letter of grief and apology written to a nine-year-old boy who died of Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome, a fatal genetic disorder that causes premature aging, heart disease, and facial abnormalities that result in an alien-like appearance. The letter was written by his caretakers at his orphanage who felt responsible for not being able to find him a home before his disease claimed his life. This little boy died knowing that no adult wanted to adopt him due to his disease and the frightening appearance that it caused. It seems to me that there are no words to describe the loneliness this little boy felt upon his death. And yet, the letter from his caretakers was rich with warmth, affection, and grief. They witnessed his life and his death, and in their witness, seemed to give it meaning.

I think it is this capacity to witness which strips death of some of its power and loneliness. At some point, all that remains is the choice to witness the death–and therefore the life–of the beloved. This choice remains to those who are living, and it is an act as powerful as that of compassion. While we cannot stand between the beloved and death, we still may choose to stand beside the beloved and witness the strength it takes for him to stand alone.

I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you . . .

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

The dying man is facing what no one around him has faced before. He is engaged, often wordlessly and invisibly, in an act of courage which those of us who are living can only dream to imagine. We cannot dream; we cannot imagine, but we can stand and watch and sit and hold vigil. We can wipe the brow, adjust the pillow, moisten the lips, and hold the shaking hand. We can tell tales, sing lullabies, and recall memories to dance like a candle storm before the wind. We can honor the presence of death with the lives that it has not yet touched, and we can give tribute to the life that is passing by standing as a representative of the lives that this life has touched–and transformed in the touching.

There is an unspeakable tragedy to the death that occurs without a witness. It is almost as though the witness acts as a conduit by which the life of the dying moves from the departing body to the hearts, minds, and spirits of those witnessing. I felt this as Lizzy died in my arms, knowing a deep intimacy to her presence that I had not known before. I lay holding Lizzy’s body as Cecilia still lived and pulsed within me, and my daughters moved within and within and within . . . lighting a flame that still guides and breathes back against every force that tries to gutter it.

We cannot die for the dying, nor live for the living. Perhaps, instead, we can act as a sort of tabernacle for the lives of the dead, holding their worth and truth and beauty in those places most inviolable and internal. And when it comes our turn to face that long, lonely battle towards death, we may find ourselves more ready to become the light for others in turn: the promise that the death that waits for each being has been faced before and can be faced again and made meaningful by those who choose to witness it. It is perhaps not dying, in the end, that holds terror for us so much as dying knowing that our lives have not mattered.

Sometimes I feel that all attempts to fight death and disease are pointless. Sometimes darkness overwhelms me, and I succumb to the exhaustion that seems to wait empty and looming behind my eyes. I don’t think we are supposed to feel strong and powerful when confronted with the boundaries of mortality. I’m even beginning to think that fear, doubt, and shame are logical, natural responses to the basic state of existence, and that choosing to silence and fight these feelings is as long and unsung a battle as death itself.

I feel lonelier as I grow older. I don’t know that this is going to get better. But I also feel a gravity to every choice that I make and every word that I speak that I did not once feel. It’s as though everything is harder by the moment, and it is that very hardness that is causing my response to matter more. I still live, and as I live, I will speak for the lives that can no longer speak for themselves. I will speak my own words, and the words of those who came before me, and in the speaking, join again what once was severed.

I cannot help but contrast the deaths of my grandfathers with the death of my daughter. I think my grandfathers had good deaths, with many witnesses. Lizzy also had many witnesses to her death, but hers was a death that no amount of witnesses could render benevolent. And yet Lizzy’s death was beautiful when standing next to that boy who died alone and unwanted in his orphanage.

What and how we choose to fight matters. We cannot fight death. Instead, we can acknowledge this life for the grueling, devastating, endless challenge that it is, and do so until the invisible end suddenly becomes the present. Each choice along the way is ultimately made alone, and yet each choice deeply impacts those around us whom we will leave behind. So how shall we choose, and how shall we speak? Will we stand witness or run from the pain? Will we choose to suffer with or to suffer alone?

I have said before that grief is a death sentence, and this is something that I still believe. I still feel my grief to be fatal, however long it takes to enact its punishment. But I’m also learning that grief grants a kind of power. Because the griever is trapped between the world of the dead and the world of the living, she belongs nowhere. Instead, she has taken on some aspects of death, of the unknown, of that which is beyond human understanding. She carries the beloved within her, and when she speaks, her words are not entirely of this world.

For six years, my maternal grandmother has carried my grandfather within her silence and her suffering. Now, my step-grandmother will do the same with my paternal grandfather. For two years, I have been learning that when I speak, it is Lizzy that guides my words: that she is the voice in the deep pool that lies spinning when I close my eyes, the fire in my head when I swallow my tears, the bird soaring ever beyond my sight, the primitive imperative of summer thunder demanding that I wake and resume fighting.

I am learning that as I grow more lonely, I also grow less alone. The more space I make within myself for Cecilia and for Lizzy, the less and less of myself remains, and thus the more myself I become. It is this becoming which makes me human, which makes me alive, which defines what remains. Lizzy lives and breathes within me and Cecilia, and that life seems to do nothing but grow stronger. I was witness to her death, vessel to her spirit, and now I give voice to the life that barely had a chance to live. To spend my life as a witness–this is what now gives meaning, and this is the only path left before my stumbling feet.

This is the choice that I make. This is the choice I will continue to make: to train myself to choose again and again to suffer with rather than suffer alone–to choose and to teach this choosing to Cecilia, so that when my time comes, she too will have the strength to suffer with and to witness.

And to believe, against all logic, that there is such a thing as a good death.