On Aging and Death

 

On Aging and Death

March 7, 2021

 

We’re all mortal. We’re all going to die. That’s how reality works. No one (except Jesus) gets out of this life alive. Moreover, every minute we live we age. We get older until we die. Some people die young. Some don’t survive infancy or even die in utero. Others of us are blessed with at least relatively long lives. Most of the people in my family tree in my generation or the generations before me died relatively young except for two aunts and my parents. My mother lived to be 87. My father died when he was 92. My twin brother is still alive but severely disabled both physically and mentally. I complain about physical conditions and short-term memory loss, but the doctors who attended my birth told my parents that I wouldn’t live through my first night. I’m 74 years old. I’d say I’ve beaten that prediction by a significant number of years. Still, I’m mortal. Some day I will day. You’re mortal too. Some day you will die.

Except in the case where someone dies suddenly before experiencing physical illness of any consequence aging brings on illness. Many of us today live far longer than nature ever intended for us to live, and we pay the price with illnesses we cure when we can and medical conditions that we manage. I’ve known for a long time that aging is not for sissies. People who live relatively long lives run up the bulk of their medical expenses in their later years, or at least most of us do. Living with physical illness is something we have to assume we will face if, that is, we don’t face it already. Even if we already have physical ailments and unhealthy conditions like high blood pressure, even if we know some of our biological family history and what people died of, we never know what the future holds for us with regard to our health. The unexpected terminal diagnosis is always a possibility. We can perhaps do things like watch our diet and exercise that may defer illness, but illness is a nearly unavoidable part of old age.

The task of those of us who are aging is to be at peace with the reality that health issues will come. To some extent they have been part of life for all of us, for some more than others. From common childhood illnesses, which are less common than they used to be, through colds and maybe the flu, and through diagnoses of medical issues like high cholesterol in our adult years, few people have avoided illness altogether before they reach advanced age. In old age medical issues become more of an issue. They will hit us harder if we delude ourselves into thinking that they won’t happen. Think of having lived into old age as a blessing (as hard as old age may be), for the only alternative is to die young. Most blessings come with a downside. Children are a blessing, but we worry about them for the rest of our lives—or theirs. Good health is a blessing, but it may mean exercising more that we want to, not eating too much of things we love like pizza and ice cream, and eating kale. The downside of aging is health problems, or at least that’s one of them.

Another is losing all of the people we’ve known and loved who die before us. Very few people came to my father’s memorial service not because he had no friends or professional colleagues but because he lived to be 92. Most of his friends and colleagues had died by the time he did. Today I’m eighteen years younger than Dad was when died, but I’ve already lost a wife, both parents, four aunts, three grandparents (the fourth died before I was born), two mothers-in-law, one father-in-law (the other died before I met my current wife so I never knew him), a mentor in ministry, and my PhD advisor to death. Our family members, friends, and colleagues are as mortal as we are. If we live long enough we’ll lose many of them before we shuffle off this mortal coil ourselves. Again our task is to be at peace with the unavoidable reality that unless we die young we will experience the deaths of many people near and dear to us.

Then there’s our own death. We must come to terms with it too, but just what is death? It is the cessation of all bodily functions. It is the end of our being, at least our being here on earth. The body and mind that were once alive become inanimate, mere physical objects—and decaying ones at that. Our physical selves relate to no one any longer. Survivors dispose of the dead body with more or less ritual and memorialization. They may grieve our passing. I’ve long felt sorry for people who have no one to grieve their deaths. Yet their lives continue for a while at least and with a hole in them that was the one who had died.

Many of us in our culture deal badly with the reality of our mortality. Urged on by advertising, we act as though if we buy the right wrinkle cream, dye out the gray, eat the right foods, don’t eat the wrong ones, and get our doctors to prescribe the right prescription drugs for us we’ll live forever. We won’t, and our spiritual and emotional health require us to get calm in the face of that reality Maybe my own struggle to get calm with it is why I’m writing this post.

I have dealt with death professionally for years. When I was a lawyer I defended many wrongful death cases. As a minister I did many memorial and graveside services. For the most part I dealt with those deaths without much difficulty. Professionalism requires and creates distance from the people and events you face. It has to. Emotional involvement of any depth in the matter you’re handling as a professional is bound to mess you’re handling of it. It’s not you don’t care about the person who has died or that person’s surviving loved ones. Especially in ministry you do. You know however that you must maintain distance if you’re going to do you job and do it well.

It is neither necessary, desirable, nor possible to maintain that kind of distance from your own death. Your death is not separate from you. It is intimately with you. It is the concluding act of your life’s drama. Like everyone else you do it alone. You can’t avoid it, so while you still can you need to come to terms with it. Or I suppose you could go through life ignoring it, except that I suspect that if you think you’re ignoring it you’re deluding yourself. At some level we’re all aware all the time that we are mortal, that death is our common lot.

So how do we reach peace with the prospect of our death? One way is to realize that since you can’t ultimately avoid death there’s no point worrying about it. Worrying about it just lets death degrade your life. This approach is similar to ignoring the reality of your death except that it fully recognizes that reality. It just sets awareness of death aside most of the time and focuses on life while life is there to focus on. Ultimately death will force itself into your consciousness, but until it does you pay no attention to it.

Another way of dealing with death is intentionally to work through whatever fear or anxiety you have about death so you can be at peace with your mortality. I suppose that’s what I’m doing here. It’s not so much that I fear death. I think I fear what the process of dying can be more than I do death. I prefer being to nonbeing, yet I know that some day I will cease to be, in this life anyway. I need to realize more fully that mortality is the natural order for all living things, including me. It is how we’re constituted as living beings. Our physical bodies cannot sustain life forever. So be at peace with who and what you are, and who and what you are includes your mortality. Don’t worry about not being what you are not. You can’t become what you’re not, at least not at the foundational existential level we’re talking about here. So be at peace with who and what you are. It may not be easy, but if you can do it your life will be more serene, more calm, more peaceful, more pleasant.

Then there’s the traditional religious way of dealing with death, that is, to see it as a passage from one plane of existence to another. In this approach you accept the proposition as true that there is life after death. The earliest Christians thought of life after death as a bodily resurrection at the end of time like the one Jesus had before the end of time. Tradition Christianity came to think of it more as the infinite survival of an eternal soul. Upon a person’s death that eternal soul departs the body but still exists. Once I walked into the hospital room of a parishioner as she took her last breath. A short time later the nurse who was present pointed up to a corner of the ceiling and said, “There she is, right there.” I didn’t have that experience of some immutable part of her being still present with us, but the nurse’s experience arose from that traditional religious belief that each person has an immortal soul. That belief is why we call death “passing.” For this kind of faith the essence of what it is to be us doesn’t die, it just passes from life on earth to life after life on earth. This belief has comforted generations of Christians and people of other faiths when a loved one has died or as they face their own deaths.

The problem with this view is that there is little evidence to support it. We are physical creatures. I once heard and atheist (who had been raised Catholic) say that life is something that happens to matter. He meant that that’s all life is. Whether it is that or not, in death our matter that had been animate becomes inanimate. The life that had happened to the dead person’s matter no longer happens to it. It’s easy enough to believe, as this atheist did, that that’s all that happens when a person dies.

There is little evidence that more than that happens upon death, but there is some; or at least there are some experiences that it is possible to take as such evidence. I’ll share a couple of my own experiences with that evidence (if that’s what it is) to show what that evidence is and what it isn’t. My first wife died of breast cancer in 2002. We had her body cremated and her ashes buried. A few months later I was walking a labyrinth, and I knew that she was walking it with me. It was like an experience with a sixth sense. I didn’t see her exactly but I sensed that she was there. She and I had a dog, an Irish Terrier named Jake. He became my dog only when my wife died. Years after her death I had to have Jake put down because his kidneys had failed. As I drove to the vet’s office to have it done I was an emotional wreck. As I drove, my first wife appeared to me and said, “It’s OK. I’m here waiting for him.” I say she appeared and spoke, but her appearance wasn’t like a normal sight. I had just some vague sense that she was in the car with me, in front of me, slightly above my eye level, and slightly to my left. I didn’t hear her in the ordinary way, but I heard her nonetheless. I can’t tell you how. I can’t tell you how it happened. I just know that I have no doubt that I experienced her being there and saying those few words to me.

Do these experiences and the countless others like them that other people have had prove that there is an immortal part of us that survives death and in some sense lives on, just on a different plane of existence? We might wish that they did. We might even convince ourselves that they do. Sadly, the truth is that they don’t. We cannot say where those experiences, real as they are, come from. Did they originate from some reality outside of ourselves? There’s no way to know. They could as easily, or perhaps more easily, have been generated by our unconscious minds as by something outside of us. We can believe that they came from one of those sources or the other, but there is no way to know.

Which brings me to where I am personally with my attitude toward death. I find the answer to the search for a way to deal with in the concept trust. I have the conviction, and I keep telling myself, that I can trust that whatever happens after death is right and good because it is how God has ordained it. Even if, as seems quite possible, there is nothing of or for us after death, that’s right and good because it is how God has set up reality for us. I don’t at all believe in hell or that God punishes us after death for our sins during our life, so I leave that notion out of consideration. If there is something like the heaven Christians and others have dreamt of, good. That is how God has ordained it. If not, that’s good too for the same reason. Death does not remove us from God’s order for existence even if that order means there’s nothing left of us after death. Whatever happens happens because it is how God has set it up. I trust that that is true.

I also choose to trust that death is not the end. I choose to trust that the experiences I described above of a deceased person nonetheless being with me do come from a reality outside of me and beyond my comprehension. I don’t know that those things are true. I trust that they are true. I live as though I knew they were true without actually knowing that they are. It facilitates my life to trust that my late first wife, Jake, and all the people I have known and loved continue their existence somewhere in God’s vast creation. Perhaps another way of saying it is that I hope that it is true, though hope is different from trust (and my father told me once that I struggle so much with the concept hope because I don’t have any). I am convinced that trust in God will get me through whatever I must go through while an intellectually unsustainable belief will not. So I live in trust, or at least I try to.

We’re all mortal. We are creatures not gods. Indeed the whole universe is mortal, but that’s a subject for another day. Our culture tells us through mass advertising and watered down popular religion not to think about mortality or to know that one day we’ll walk the golden streets of heaven. Our culture’s message is live as though you’ll live forever. And it’s all a big lie. We are mortal, and coming to terms with mortality requires thought and discernment deeper than our culture requires of us. My thought and discernment have led me to trust God. Perhaps yours will lead you there too.