Writing about dying
We praise the dead with elegies and obituaries, send cards of condolence and put loving memories on their gravestones. We advise each other not to speak ill of the dead, but we also speak ill of them and some of them undoubtedly deserve that. Some we remember, and some we forget. While some people manage to be clever about famous last words, mostly death is a step into silence, and it will fall to someone else to frame our lives in retrospect.
In some ways this seems more comfortable, because it spares us from having to think about our own mortality too much. Thinking about the writing-up of a life, we have to ask if we will be written off. Do our actions stand up to scrutiny? Did we do anything worth commenting on? Would anyone care if we went? Who would mourn us, and how? Who would remember us, and how? Asking such questions may be comforting if you are loved and successful, but if you have any doubts about your life, then framing that with ideas about your death will not be an easy business.
My impression of our heroic ancestors – the Celts, and the Vikings, especially, is that they did think about these things. A good life, a heroic death if you can manage it, and something people will tell stories about for years to come. We tend not to think in terms of the heroic life any more or to imagine it as widely accessible. What does heroism mean in this day and age? Then there’s the Egyptians, with their elaborate funeral arrangements, their lives obviously very much informed by their ideas about death.
There are other options aside from the heroic. We can think about the love that we have brought into the world, and what of that remains after we have gone. Will the work we do outlive us? In small ways, as ancestors of place to future generations, we have all kinds of impact. Is that something to be proud of, or embarrassed about? How is history going to judge us, individually and collectively.
These are sobering thoughts, which is why the perspective of death is so greatly needed right now.
