Ars vivendi
Why the art of living is the art of dying
Can we achieve anything better than a death-phobic culture’s hyped-up hopes of dying with dignity? Or living forever?
I think so. Embracing our life and death are opportunities to pursue and celebrate precious mysteries. Living with an abiding acceptance of our death, be it near or far, is a path for crafting a legacy for our families and loved ones that’s almost unimaginable in a death-phobic culture.
Every day we have opportunities to nourish ourselves and those dear to us by cultivating the skills of living and dying well. This matters, because our children and everyone who remembers us will feed at the table we’ve set.
Sherwin Nuland said the dignity that so many seek in dying is really achieved in the dignity with which we live our lives. Ars moriendi is ars vivendi.
‘The art of dying is the art of living,’ he says. ‘The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that preceded them. Who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.’
If we want to make an art of living and dying for ourselves and those we love then we need to learn what these things mean, what they ask of us, and then fashion them from our resources and good intentions.
The bad news is there are no short cuts. The good news is these things can be learned and achieved — but doing so means surrendering a lot of what we think we know about living and dying by expanding our capacity for wonder.
Stephen Jenkinson put it like this: ‘Learning wonders about things we claim to know and about knowing at all. It wonders if knowing is all it’s cracked up to be. Learning is subversive. What it asks you to pay in tuition is most of what you had thought was true, and what was necessary, and what was enduringly so.’
In this respect, learning how to live and die asks us to learn difficult things that are in short supply: things that can’t be downloaded from the internet, wisdom that can’t be copy-pasted from books, or readily adapted from TED Talks.
They call for courage and determination and stamina, a willingness to unlearn what we think we need, and a resolution to be in service to something deeply human and long forgotten.
They ask us to live and die with a cognisance of our debt, our inability to repay the bounty given to us, and an intuition for healing our stories of wounding and brokenness, so that we can give the world what it most needs.
This an edited extract from Dan Gaffney’s new book and podcast series, ‘Journey Home — Essays on Living and Dying’, published in November 2019.
