Death as a (Potentially) Glorious Part of Life

Originally posted at The Way of the Rose 54-Day Novena Facebook group August 19, 2020

Novena Day 7

The Joyful Mysteries

Yesterday, I talked about death and how the rosary gives us two examples, one violent, one peaceful.

One sorrowful, and one glorious.

I didn’t make that explicit yesterday, but it’s there isn’t it? Mary’s death is literally classified as “glorious.”

That has to be hard to wrap one’s head around in our culture, especially given the circumstances of her death. She doesn’t go out in a blaze of glory. She isn’t heroic. She isn’t martyred. She “just” goes to sleep and wakes up in heaven, yet her death is “glorious.”

As far as I’m concerned, it’s definitely “glorious” in one respect. Mary closes her eyes on earth and opens them in heaven. In the blink of an eye her circumstances change completely. This tells me that heaven isn’t “out there” or “up there” or any “there” at all. Heaven suffuses all space and all time, right where we are now.

Mary blinks, and her earthly trials are over.

Jesus ascends in the second glorious mystery, showing us that “the veil” between heaven and earth can be pierced from below. The Divine Mother enters us at our invitation in the third glorious mystery, demonstrating that the veil can be pierced from above. But Mary’s death is something else again: It makes it clear there is no veil: The distance between heaven and earth is a blink of the eye, a simple shift in consciousness.

What else could we change in a moment with a similar shift? My mind reels with the possibilities. “Glorious” indeed.

My son’s Zane’s death wasn’t glorious. He stopped breathing, and my husband did CPR. Then paramedics gave him drugs and probably did “heroic” compressions and electrical stimulation—for a long time. Much as we hated the idea of our tiny little son being assaulted in this manner, we would have felt justified in allowing (inviting) these interventions if he’d lived, even if they’d left lasting damage.

Because that’s all that matters, right, that we extend our time on earth to the maximum possible extent? If you’re alive, you and your loved ones have no right to be anything but grateful.

That’s what you’d think from observing our culture. Postponing death as long as possible is lauded and rewarded, while the cost of such postponements to the subject—in dollars, pain, or anguish—is rarely figured into the overall assessment. Any effort to add accountability is derided as valuing things over people, but that’s a straw man argument. Yes, merely counting the societal dollars is a cold-hearted and reductionist way to make decisions, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about about a more holistic way of thinking about life and death and looking at the unintended consequences of any reductionist thinking. Remember the movie The Incredibles? I always liked that it was about bringing accountability to superheroic measures, even if only temporarily. How much destruction are we okay with in heroic rescues? And destruction to what exactly?

And Zane didn’t live. In fact, when Dr. Sunshine (his real name) told us our beautiful little boy was going to die, Bill and I immediately regretted the violence we’d put him through. We both wished we had allowed him to die peacefully, in our arms, rather than hooked up to monitors and machines in a NICU, with his family relegated to the waiting room.

It’s hard to know when it’s appropriate to attempt heroic measures and when to let them go, and there is no hard and fast rule that can be applied to all. We’re individuals with different beliefs, different emotions, different circumstances. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that death is an inherent part of life. Every birth creates a life with death as a part of the package. The joy of birth is inevitably succeeded by death—whether sorrowful or glorious.

More and more, we apply heroic measures across the board, without regard to the individual or the circumstances, and loved ones console themselves for the violence with, “Well, at least we did all we could.” The only measure we have for a life well-lived is time. The longer the life, the better. But we all know people for whom that just wasn’t true. People whom we wish had been allowed to die with dignity. And this thinking tends to elevate medical professionals to godlike status with power over life and death.

In our quest to gain control over death by eliminating all risk from life—except the risks that come from heroic interventions themselves, which somehow always seem to be considered negligible—and to postpone it as long as possible no matter the cost, we have lost a precious part of our humanity.

We’ve heard horrendous stories of extreme medicalized death, lacking in any human compassion, especially in recent months. And we’ve heard stories of people so afraid of death that they either withdraw completely from life or scream at those who do not. And we’ve heard stories about people who don’t care who dies or how as long as it’s not themselves. No matter which COVID strategies prove to be most effective, I am deeply concerned about our reactions to them. No matter what level of risk an individual is comfortable with, it’s important to hold onto our humanity.

We need to remember that death is a part of life—and can be a beautiful part if we treat it as the sacred transition it is.

I suspect that COVID is a warning shot across the bow. A hint of difficulties to come. Frightening as it may be, as pandemics go, the death rate is comparatively low. That may not be true with the next disaster.

We have an opportunity now to determine who we want to be going forward, how we want to live, and how we want to die.

Let’s use it well.