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Worth It
"Most things may never happen: this one will. . . ."I only recently discovered Philip Larkin's great poem "Aubade," but it gets to it, doesn't it? It gets to the fear that I daresay all of us feel at times, if and when we stop long enough to contemplate "it." Death, that is. "Most things may never happen: this one will. . . ," wrote Larkin. Wislawa Szymborska, in her poem "A Word on Statistics," also reminds us that,
--Philip Larkin, from "Aubade"
Out of every hundred people . . .As comedic playwright Michael Cristofer once wrote, ". . . Virtually everyone alive is terminal, and that's a funny, sort of ironic situation--especially since it's so carefully avoided." We are a death denying culture. We do not like to admit that we, too, are "part of the passing tide." As Rabbi Earl Grollman has written, ". . .The subject of death is the most significant taboo of our society." We don't like to think or talk about it: it's morbid, we say. "There is a superstitious belief," says Grollman, "that if it is not talked about, it will simply disappear." Of course, it will not.Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred--
a figure that has never varied yet.
I admit, death in and of itself is a rather depressing subject. (Just pick up a copy of Dr. Sherwin Nuland's book How We Die if you want to learn why.) However, it is what the knowledge of death can cause us to do that is important. As D. J. Enright has written, "To talk at all interestingly about death is inevitably to talk about life." The important question, I believe, is not, "What happens when I die?" (we don't know) but rather, "What has my life meant? or What does my life mean in the face of death?"
Is it worth it? Is life really worth the reality of our inevitable death?
Every birth is the beginning of the process of death. This truth drove the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas to distraction, causing him to write in his great poem "Fern Hill,"
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dyingYet, one could argue that it is precisely this hard reality of death which gives life its meaning and its worth. Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, has written that ". . . Knowing we will never die would be unbearable. We might wish for a longer life, or a happier one, but how could any of us endure a life that went on forever? For many of us, we will come to the point where death will be the only healer for the pain which our lives will have come to contain." [my emphasis]
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Some of us, of course, will never get enough of life, either through some tragic abbreviation or from a surfeit of energy and zest for living; though even a short or foreshortened life can be rich in meaning and enjoyment. A few of us, unfortunately, will get too much, living beyond our physical limitations, or simply losing the desire to be alive at all. But the miracle is that most of us will still believe at the end that the journey of life was worth it.
Poet David Ignatow has written,
I wished for death oftenMost of us, like Ignatow, will wish for death at times in our lives, but most of us will decide to stick around to find out what happens next, and many of us will even end up, like him, praising this world "above everything." We will look death in the face, whether near or far, and in the words of Genesis, we will "choose life."
but now that I am at its door
I have changed my mind about the world.
It should go on; it is beautiful
even as a dream, filled with water and seed,
plants and animals, others like myself,
ships and buildings and messages
filling the air--a beauty,
if ever I have seen one.
In the next world, should I remember
this one, I will praise it
above everything.
In spite of the tragedy which is inherent in life, poet Dawna Markova writes, in what sounds like post-9/11 defiance,
I will not live an unlived life.In a sermon entitled "Nothing Ventured: How We Die and How We Live," Unitarian Universalist minister Richard Gilbert wrote,
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
To allow my living to open me,
To make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
To live,
So that that which came to me as seed
Goes to the next blossom,
And that which came
to me as blossom
goes as fruit.
I refuse to despair of death. The very fact of death greatly concentrates my soul. We live in its mystery; we work in the dark; we do what we can; we give what we have; we live as we are able. If we cannot solve the riddle, and I wager we cannot, we learn to live with it and enjoy it. So we prepare for death by living a life.Perhaps we are naive, but Unitarian Universalists affirm that life is good in spite of the fact that we grow old and die. We offer no certainties because there are none. No one knows what happens after we die. The only certainties are life and death themselves. We don't always have much control over our deaths. But we do most certainly have control over our living, and some of us will even have control over the manner of our dying.
I happen to be one of those persons who believes that life is worth living. Oh, not all the time, of course, but ultimately. I tend to look on the dark side a lot more than I should. But on balance, I have more good days than bad ones. A few years ago, Boston Globe columnist Linda Weltner wrote in a piece entitled "Dealing with the fear of death,"
It doesn't feel morbid to talk about [death] while I'm young and healthy. To bury the fear of death so deep that you never touch it is to give it ultimate power over you. I'd rather think about dying now then to panic and make a bad decision later, or end up forcing someone I love to linger in pain because I'm not ready to hear the truth about his condition. Nor do I want my children to stand at my bedside, agonizing over what I'd want them to do. Maybe that can't be avoided; at least I can try.And so can many others. I don't know whether I would have the spirit to emulate him, but I have to admit that I admire what I know of the late Elmer Elliott of Rockport, Maine. Elmer, who was 85 at the time, and who knew he had a bad heart and suspected he had cancer, decided to make a five day visit to Boston for what he called his "last hurrah." The story was written up by former Globe "Our Towne" columnist Jack Thomas, who described Elmer's last hurrah as,We're born. We exist. We die, she wrote,
I can live with that.
. . .a pilgrimage that enables him to dine one last time at the Ritz-Carlton overlooking the Public Garden, and to taste those great scallops at Anthony's Pier Four. It's the final opportunity to cruise Boston Harbor and shop at Brooks Brothers and browse the Old Corner Bookstore, and one last chance to enjoy the Boston Pops and hear Dave McKenna playing "Bye-Bye Blackbird" at the Copley Plaza, and Bo Winiker's Orchestra at the Parker House in a Dixie Land version of "Tin Roof Blues.""How am I?" Mr. Elliott was asked:
Well, everything's falling apart, as you can imagine. I feel about two steps from the grave, and I'm taking this trip while I can. There's no sadness, though, I've had a hell of a life. Except for a stepson who's a professor at Temple University, I have no living relatives. I'm all alone in the world now.Clearly, Elmer Elliott was a man who had found life to be worth living, in spite of all he didn't know and of all the evidence to the contrary. From what we know of him, he came close to Mark Twain's admonition, "So live, that when you come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry." His only regret, he said, was that he had no one with whom to share his experience. "I hate to be alone," he said.I know it's the end of life, but I thought it was all over a few months ago when I went into the darn surgery, and now that I have this respite, I've made a decision to use it well. I'm not a religious person, although, as a traveler, I've been in many cathedrals, because that's where they take you, and I've been blessed by the Pope. But an afterlife? Well, it's not like we have here, with human beings. There's an electrical force in all of us that goes back somewhere, I don't know what it is, but there's a god that's responsible, a powerful being. Not in the likeness of man, but something makes this possible.
Some fates, we need to remember, are worse than death.
In order to live well, I would argue that we need the consciousness of death. In order to die well, we need to accept the tenuousness of the gift of life. For life is a gift--and the condition of the gift is that we must make meaning of it in the face of death. We can have it no other way.
So is it finally worth it, in the face of what the poet Larkin calls so chillingly "unresting death"? Poet Miguel Otero Silva writes,
When nothing remains of me but a tree,Life, to be truly worth it, must be lived at least in part for others, and for the future of the world. May the inevitable fear of death, coming in the night or whenever it finds us, remind us always of all that we have in common with each other. And may we awake to the new dawn, singing praises to the gift of life, not only in spite of death, but even because of it. Amen.
when my ashes have been scattered beneath our mother earth;
When nothing remains of you but a red rose,
nourished by that which once you were;
When the breath of the kiss that we exchange today has
embarked upon a thousand different breezes;
When even our names have become
mere sounds without echo
asleep in the shade of a fathomless sound;
then you will live on in the beauty of the rose;
and I in the rustling of the tree;
and our love in the murmur of the breeze.
Listen to me!
My wish for us is to live also
in the spoken words of men and women.
I would survive with you
in the deep lifestream of humanity,
in the laughter of children,
in the peace of humankind,
in the love without weeping.
Therefore, as we must give ourselves to the rose and the tree,
To the earth and the wind,
Let us give ourselves, I beg you, to
the future of the world.
The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
Closing Prayer by Bruce Southworth:
O Mysterious God of life and Death, Source of love,
When our questions challenge a troubling, troubled world,
May our courage remain with us.
When the mysteries--the pain of paradox and sorrow--knife us,
May deeper awareness and sensitivity sustain us.
May the Love of Truth comfort us and lead us.
May honesty of thought and deed unite in us, and thus
May the Spirit of Life renew us. Amen.
