To practice death is to practice freedom
Grief rises when we feel we’ve lost something or someone irreplaceable. In Journey Home my new book and podcast series I’ve written a lot about the grief and fear we hold about dying. I’ve also argued how and why it’s important to do the difficult work of being mindful of death, of forming a relationship with it, so that we can deprive it of its power and therby live and die more freely.
When my father died I felt I’d lost a mentor. A guide. A co-conspirator in life.
Dad was a prodigious reader — of history, politics, economics, memoirs, and all kinds of fiction — and he passed many of those interests and capacities on to me. Most of all, he was a storyteller without peer. Like Dickens, his stories were full of characters and action and they always had a punchline and a moral to them. In essence, his stories were narratives about the human condition — our vanities and foibles, our schemes and ambitions, our victories and failures — all voiced with the kind-hearted humour of his indelible Irish temperament. His death flattened me, and I miss him every day.
“Death disrupts the habits of a lifetime,” I wrote of his passing. “My old partner could no longer play his part in our long running double-act. I grieved for both of us. For what we’d shared, for what we hadn’t, and for what had ended.” [1]
When mum died my grieving was different. I felt the life force sucked out of me. For the first time, I had the eerie feeling that I’d suddenly lost my claim on life, that I’d had a foretaste of my death. Suddenly, I felt like a dead man walking and not long afterwards I was diagnosed with an incurable cancer that will eventually kill me.
“Sitting by her warm, lifeless body the next day, I howled in grief and gratitude for what she’d endured and shared and taught me about dying with an open heart. She’d spared us both from the curse of competency. And by abandoning hope and candidly inviting me to witness and aid her dying with all its suffering and loss, she’d led me to experience everything I felt without reserve.
“Her gift was to feed me a little of my own death, so I’d have something to nourish me when I got there. I prayed my grief would never leave me. I didn’t want to be fixed or mended or healed because I knew the price of getting over my sorrow would be a kind of amnesia about what it meant to be fully human.
“So, I vowed to make a home for it, sensing that my broken-heartedness would keep me awake and maybe more useful in the world.” [2]
Grieving our losses is natural and starts early in life. We are social and familial creatures who need the support and connection and love of others for our health and happiness. Loss therefore triggers sadness (and fear) that comes from experiencing life’s temporality — the fact that everything and everyone we love is passing ineluctably into the void.
But death has also become a monster at the heart of our myths and cultural stories. We fear it all our lives and then we grieve it when it claims those we love. But we needn’t fear it so. I have a hunch that coming to terms with death (mine, yours, ours), whatever that means for each of us, might even help us with our lesser losses while giving some perspective to our ‘first world’ problems.
I say this recalling the words of Michel de Montaigne, a French Renaissance writer who argued that forging a kinship with death is the path to freedom. He said: ‘To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one, let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death. We do not know where death awaits us so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.’ [3]
How to practise death?
There is no one path because while death is universal it’s also intensely personal so far as our bodies and minds are concerned. Practising death means creating a meaning of our lives so that we can break the chains that bind us in fear. It means being free, which really means clearing out the store of regrets and pain and suffering in our hearts. It means being able to say with absolute truth that today is a good day to die.
In his seminal book, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Body and Soul, Stephen Jenkinson said that during his time as a social worker who counselled dying people and their families, the most frequent request made of him was to talk about meaning at the end of life.
Behind this request was the idea that life and death’s meanings are somehow ‘elusive or even fugitive’ to us, says Jenkinson. That the meaning of our lives and deaths have become riddles, mysteries, even to ourselves, that need deciphering. [4]
Jenkinson says the meaning of our life and death isn’t something we find or discover but something we make by being keen observers. As humans, our task is to make a meaning of life and death by acknowledging something profoundly simple.
“Life must proceed’, he says, ‘as if certain things must be: like life has to continue, not you have to continue. That life is not your lifespan or your children’s lifespan, or the lifespan of what you hold dear. How about holding dear the fact that nothing you hold dear lasts?
“How about holding that close to your bosom?” [5]
Dan Gaffney MA, MPH is a teacher and author. This is an excerpt from his new book and podcast series, ‘Journey Home — Essays on Living and Dying’ was published in November 2019.
[1] Dan Gaffney, Journey Home: essays on living and dying, True North Media, 2019, p57
[2] Ibid, p120
[3] Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, translated and edited by MA Screech (London: Allen Lane, 1991), p95.
[4] Stephen Jenkinson The Meaning of Death, Orphan Wisdom, 2013
[5] Ibid
