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“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
―Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Social context powerfully influences our relationship with death. When aged people are treated as worthy at the time of death and are part of a culture that practices this treatment, they are more likely to have a strong sense of self-worth and satisfaction in the final years of their lives. In some societies almost everyone dies with a greater acceptance because of poverty, extreme physical decay or circumstances that destroy the desire to live. In these cases death is not much of a problem for anyone. Other societies surround death in old age with elaborate ritual. In traditional societies a sense of continuity may prevail and ease the loss of a loved one and the work will be carried on by the next generation.
The age when decline begins always has depended largely on social class. Physical workers decline earlier because of the nature of their work and their decline is more rapid. The body falls victim to exposure, disease and infirmity. In old age lower classes often are condemned to extreme poverty, inconvenient and unsafe dwellings, loneliness, and a feeling of failure that they have not achieved what others have. Extended family ties can be particularly strong and supportive to help these people. In traditional societies where the cult of ancestors is strong, such as China and India, survivors may fear retribution from spirits beyond the grave, encouraging survivors to faithfully perform the traditional rites.
Until recent times people grew up intimately acquainted with death because they had seen people of all ages die around them. Today adults and children have escaped this knowledge because of the dramatic success of public health in increasing life expectancy. What is new today is that most of the people dying are old and many families are inexperienced and uncomfortable with their relatives’ deaths. To the family a terminally ill person, even one who is much beloved, represents physical and emotional exhaustion, old family resentments unearthed, and possibly a drastic revision of customary relationships, especially when a grown child must assume the role of “parent” to the actual parent.
Throughout human history, and until very recently, most people died at home. In many cases in western culture it was an occasion over which the dying individual would preside. The extended family and the community participated with visits, advice to the survivors, religious rituals, farewells and blessings. It was a final affirmation of the person and his or her place in society. The moment has been captured in many paintings. You might even say Louis XIV overdid it a bit!
Art provides numerous examples of a more violent, disturbing transition into death. See, for example, the “Danse Macabre” motif that haunted the Middle Ages—a frenzied dance performed with a corpse or skeleton, in which all people, regardless of status, were dragged to their death.
In the fourteenth century, when the Black Death wiped out one-third of the population and the Renaissance redirected attention from heaven to the world of nature and man, the predominant image of death became a hideous corpse rotting in nature. A whole new literature called the Art of Dying sprang up. In Breughel’s paintings we see the fascination with natural rot and corruption.
In time, these fearsome images were replaced by the more benign one of death surrounded by one’s family. Today most people die in institutions—in hospitals or nursing homes. Their care often is considered more a technical matter than one of moral concern. Too often in these institutions there is more attention paid to the diseases than to persons, more scientific curiosity about the machinery of the body than consideration of the human values that make a life worthwhile, more focus on subspecialty technicalities and analgesic adjustments with no one looking at the needs of the whole person. Being a patient alone in a hospital, subjected to multiple traumatic high-tech procedures and covered with tubes, has become a symbol of contemporary death. In these situations the very subject of death is carefully avoided: the patient, the family, the doctors and nurses sometimes engage in a mutual pretense that the dying patient is not dying but somehow is going to recover. Communication is unemotional and avoids all unpleasant topics. Meanwhile, the dying patient is isolated and deprived of his deepest needs for emotional support.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can give ourselves and our loved ones the benefit of a peaceful, supported death that does justice to the life we live and the spirit within each of us.
The Process of Dying
Dying is often one of the most peaceful events of life, except in those who steadfastly try to control the uncontrollable. We don’t know exactly how the brain’s biochemistry alters in dying but we know it includes the release of endorphins, oxygen deficiency, sensory deprivation and activation of the brain’s right hemisphere. People appear to go through a succession of stages and become relaxed, then absentminded, and drowsy. They sleep and enter a hypnotic state followed by coma and paralysis. Breathing slows and then stops, the heart and metabolism and growth stop and finally the blood congeals and rigor mortis sets in. Many physicians have noted in their experience a detached serenity in the dying person. In the 16th century the philosopher Montaigne wrote “If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; Nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care for it.”
Sometimes there is even joy. Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet, “How oft when men are at the point of death have they been merry! Which their keepers call A lightening before death.” The last words of the scientist Thomas Edison were “It’s very beautiful over there.” The philosopher William James said, “It’s so good to get home.” And Isapwo Muksilca Crowfoot, a Blackfoot Indian chief said, “A little while and I will be gone—whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is the flash of the firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow than runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
