Death Everywhere and What to Do about It

Today, November 22, is the sixtieth anniversary of the death of my mentor and friend (although I never met him), C. S. Lewis.

Very early tomorrow morning is the tenth anniversary of the death of my “little” brother Noel, who died in a fancy New York City hospital with a window overlooking the Hudson River, surrounded by his family who loved him very much.

Because of that I didn’t make it to Westminster Abbey for the Lewis ceremony, but I’m pretty sure Jack would approve.

My sister, Missy, spent last night and will again spend today (and perhaps tomorrow) by the bedside of her good friend who is probably not going to make it to the weekend. Missy tried her best, for years, to get her friend to stop smoking. She didn’t stop, but that doesn’t stop Missy from being there for her.

Flying home from London Monday, a fellow passenger died in front of me, actually right where my feet would have been if I hadn’t moved from the left side exit row to the right side exit row to give the crew room to try to save her. I watched them heroically try to do so for well over an hour. The last two hours of the flight, her dead body lay covered in airline blankets, in the bulkhead, five feet away from new seat.  

It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and it’s almost Advent, which means it's almost Christmas, But it feels like Ash Wednesday. I’m not usually morbid, but death is everywhere (re-read the previous paragraph if necessary). 

Just ask the people in Gaza. Or Israel. Or Ukraine. Or your local cemetery. 

A week ago tomorrow I gave a talk at a university in England on Hamlet in the graveyard. Put a skull in his hand (the gravedigger has an almost endless supply) and Hamlet chatters on and on as he is wont to do about pretty much everything. I mean on and on and on. But when he finds out that he is holding the skull of a childhood friend, he shuts up, if only for a few seconds. I love what he says, though. “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio.” As it sinks in, then, his “gorge rises at it”; in other words, he feels like he needs to throw up. If I directed the play, he would. 

And then, like yours truly, he begins to moralize, a certain sickness our species is prone to, just as surely as we are prone to die. 

So many puzzles in Hamlet, but none more puzzling than this. “The unknown country from whom no traveler returns,” where “what dreams may come" "puzzles the will."  Thus says Hamlet, a man still grieving the death of his own dear father. 

C. S. Lewis (whose 1942 lecture on Hamlet is perhaps my favorite of all of his writings) says that “the subject of Hamlet is death.” It is, according to Lewis, a haunted play -- haunted, first of all, by THE ghost of Hamlet’s father, who “strikes the note” at the beginning of the play. But, in a broader sense, it is haunted, as is Hamlet himself, by the difficult reality of human encounters with the reality of death, decay, oblivion, decomposition, and apparent disappearance. 

Lewis writes:

From the platform [in Act one, scene one] we pass to the court scene and Hamlet’s first long speech: . . . lines about the melting of flesh into a dew and the divine prohibition of self-slaughter. We have a second ghost scene after which the play itself . . . goes mad for some minutes. We have a second soliloquy on the theme “to die . . . to sleep”; and a third on “witching time of night, when churchyards yawn.” . . . We have the ghost third appearance. Ophelia goes mad and is drowned. The comes the comic relief, surely the strangest comic relief ever written – comic relief beside an open grave . . . , a detailed inquiry into the rate of decomposition, a few clutches of skulls, and than “Alas, poor Yorick!” On top of this, the hideous fighting in the grave [I might add, it is Ophelia’s grave]; and then, soon, the catastrophe [in which Hamlet, Laertes, Claudius, and Gertrude die].

What makes it especially difficult, for Hamlet and for us, is that the dead are not just “the dead.” They are, at least some of the time, our dead. Hamlet remembers, in this most grotesque situation (but all our encounters with death are grotesque or at least awkward), how he used to ride on Yorick’s back, how he used to kiss him, how used to be so full of life – singing, dancing, joking, literally the life of the party of life (Hamlet remembers “your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar”). Yorick was an electrical charge in the consciousness and even the body of Hamlet that made “life” not just a four letter word meaning “physical existence” but something more like “a gift” or even “a miracle.”

As I said, I never knew C. S. Lewis in person, but we have plenty of evidence that he did the same for many of those who knew him. Bigger than life, is a common description. 

My brother Noel was the life of every party, the energy in every room, the noise above the general hum of things. I wrote about him A LOT in past Ben Camino meditations. You can look 'em up. He is worth the effort. 

My sister’s friend is now surrounded by family (and at least one good friend) testifying to her significance to them. [Update, she died as I was writing this.]

I don’t know about my fellow passenger on the plane from London to Austin. I kept praying “Lord have mercy” while things were still in doubt. I’m doing so still for her, for her family and loved ones, but also for the lovely crew who spent themselves and gently called her name a thousand times hoping to make her hold on. 

As Kurt Vonnegut would say, “And so it goes.” As C. S. Lewis might say, quoting his gravestone, “Men must endure there going hence.” Of course, that was not really C. S. Lewis. It was Shakespeare. Well, it wasn’t really Shakespeare, it was Edgar, a character in King Lear, who was encouraging his father not to lie down and die. Actually, even that’s not the whole passage on Lewis's gravestone. What Edgar really says is “Men must endure their going hence, as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.”

Maybe there’s something more to it than all that. Maybe the goodness and the wonder and the mystery point at something more. All I know right now, and I can’t forget it because my sister just keeps repeating it these days (as she stays by and says goodbye to a friend), “life is precious.” 

And, of course, we knew just how precious it was as we saw it slip away from our brother ten years ago tomorrow. 

If you believe the most basic doctrine of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity – the doctrine of the good creation – that’s all you need to know to agree that life is precious. In fact, it’s so foundational I think we need to be careful not to leap too quickly to the last things in those grand narratives. 

It is a comfort to believe, if you can, that there is something more. It may even be a duty if you are convinced of its truth. I confess it to be true on a weekly basis. 

But, first things first. Life is precious. Every life. 

That’s why we sit and wait with the living/dead. 

That’s why those flight attendants, some of them so young and tender that they were crying as they administered CPR, worked so hard. 

That’s why we feed the hungry. 

That’s why we need to end the war(s). 

Easier said than done, I know. Because there is no "how to" manual. 

Hamlet in the graveyard, holding Yorick’s skull, doesn’t riff on what’s beyond the grave. Instead, he and Yorick tell us to think more clearly about the grave. In quick succession, Hamlet references “my lady” (he means the nobility), Alexander the Great, and Caesar, all of whom need to hear the gospel according to Yorick. It is, in short, that they too will die, and all their pride and power will rot to dust, someday to be used by a poor person to “patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw!” Starting to sound like Ash Wednesday. 

The empty-souled, inauthentic, self-important protagonist in Tolstoy’s magnificent “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” undergoes a freak injury while decorating his home (he falls off a ladder hanging curtains) and begins to die. This process sparks in him certain memories and questions. 

He remembers, after many years, the first syllogism he learned back in school. “Caius is a man, All men are mortal, Caius is mortal.”  This, Tolstoy writes, “had seemed to him all his life to be correct only in relation to Caius, but by no mean to himself. For the man Caius, man in general, it was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius and not man in general, he had always been quite, quite separate from all other beings.”

 Of course, we celebrate and should celebrate our individuality. But as Aristotle taught, one generation’s (or culture’s) extreme becomes another’s mean. And I do mean mean. Individuality celebrated without the balance of care for others and awareness of mortality becomes an ugly new norm, selfishness instead of a proper sense of self-in-relation.

Tolstoy depicts such a person masterfully, but with surprising grace. In the conclusion, Ivan asks forgiveness of his family for his selfishness and moral lethargy. It's not clear whether they understand his dying words or not, but that's the way it goes down here. 

Although it is too late for him to change his ways vis-à-vis humanity, it is not too late for us, Tolstoy’s readers. Hamlet and his dead friend Yorick point to the ultimate (as far we know) common denominator of all human beings, death. And they especially mock the proud and powerful who ignore both the reality of death and what they might have contributed to the greater good of the still living. 

King Lear goes a step further. Contemplating his vulnerability and mortality in the famous storm scene, the (previous) tyrant, prays to the “poor naked wretches” whose plight he has previously ignored. And he preaches to himself the need to “expose thyself to feel what wretches feel/That thou mayest shake the superflux to them [share your abundance with the needy].”

C. S. Lewis, in his justly famous sermon (and essay) The Weight of Glory, points us to another realm, one he was all but incapable of ignoring. He too asks us, as another great teacher did in a parable about sheep and goats, to look upon our fellow mortals as creatures worth our ultimate care and attention. Almost, he hints, our worship, they are so wonderfully made. 

I once proposed that churches everywhere should have a “healing service” at least once a year that was designed to pray for and honor the medical professionals in our parishes/communities. Obviously, today, I can hear the joke about salaries and golf-courses. My point is that I don’t know how but we have to start moving back towards a more humane view of human care unless we are willing to keep stating the obvious. That caring for humans is what we should be about. Perhaps at the risk of being misunderstood, we can find ways to do so.

Maybe we could start like my sister does. She knits lovely Christmissy caps for one local nursing home facility, the one our mother was in for the last few years of her life. She and my brother and I visit one day near Christmas to distribute them, to sing Christmas songs with the residents, and to honor the difficult but beautiful work of caring for these vulnerable folks. 

Those lives, like the lives of those I remember today, are precious. There are no ordinary people. We have never met a “mere mortal.” And for some of us, the reminder that we do share a common life (and death) with each other, is necessary. And, I don't mean to be gloomy, but I never come away from there without thinking about death. 

I’m not going to turn this around and start talking about eternity. I will leave that to C. S. Lewis who, as I said, couldn't seem to stop talking about it (all you have to do is read “The Weight of Glory”). Instead, I will leave that topic to Bruce Cockburn and his wonderful song, “Wondering Where the Lions are.” You can click on the link below. I hope you dance a bit. Thanks for being alive at the same time as me. Let me know if you read this. Dedicated to I.P. Khovacs.

Wondering Where the Lions Are

Christmissy Caps for All