I knew a man who once said, “Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.”
--From the movie Gladiator
You might suppose the sight of my name on a tombstone would terrify me, and thirty-five years ago you would have supposed correctly.
When I was a teenager, I believed for whatever strange reason that I would die before reaching thirty, that I would go to glory violently and dramatically, and that friends and family would lament my passing. Like Huck Finn, I saw myself at my funeral, grieved by those who had loved me.
--From the movie Gladiator
You might suppose the sight of my name on a tombstone would terrify me, and thirty-five years ago you would have supposed correctly.
When I was a teenager, I believed for whatever strange reason that I would die before reaching thirty, that I would go to glory violently and dramatically, and that friends and family would lament my passing. Like Huck Finn, I saw myself at my funeral, grieved by those who had loved me.
Death for me at that age was a concept rather than a reality, imagined rather than experienced. In my younger years, I had lost two grandparents, but had never truly experienced first-hand the death of another. Even working in a hospital operating room one summer in high school had little impact on my romance with death. Looking back now at myself at the ages of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I see a foolish boy whose perceptions had outrun his experiences regarding life’s chief puzzles: love and death.
That romantic view of death crossed the River Styx when I hit my mid-twenties and understood the finality of a visit from the Grim Reaper. I remember the exact moment I began to fear death. I was watching some movie—I can’t remember the name of the film—in a theater with my wife when one of the actors, Woody Allen, made a joke about dying and death. The audience laughed, but his comment hit me with the force of a hammer. I understood the comedian wasn’t joking. He was so brazenly speaking the truth about death that the audience found his comment funny. That’s when I truly knew I was someday going to die, and the thought terrified me.
For several years, this idea of extinction haunted me. Oh, don’t misunderstand me: I didn’t dwell on death, I didn’t become obsessed by my future demise, but always there occurred those solitary moments—at dawn, at three o’clock in the morning, in a car ride alone—when icy thoughts of death and oblivion would seize my imagination. Once, shortly after my thirtieth birthday, I added up the number of days remaining to me, were I to live to seventy, and was appalled by the low number of that calculation.
Then came a final shift in my views regarding the end of life. My mother died of liver cancer at a relatively young age, and in her passing she gave me as her last gift the ability to face and accept death. By then I had become a Christian—to be specific, a Catholic—and to watch my mother dying removed my lingering fears of death. She died at home in her own bed and in accordance with the tenets of her Protestant faith. She died surrounded by her family and by their prayers. She died nobly, bravely, and well.
Twelve years later, my wife died. Hers was a different sort of death. Kris collapsed from a brain aneurysm and never regained consciousness. She had no time to say goodbye to me or the children, no time for me ask her forgiveness for our quarrels over the years, no time for her to do anything but die.
For five days Kris was in a coma in the hospital in Asheville. On the fourth day, a nurse pulled me aside and said: “I notice your children keep praying for their mom. Don’t they understand she’s dying? You know she’s not going to get any better.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “They know she’s dying, and it’s true they’re praying for a miracle. But they’re also praying for the repose of her soul.”
Kris died in May. I remember little from that summer following her burial. I have no idea, for example, why I agreed to have my name engraved on that tombstone. The stonecutters suggested it, and I went along with them.
I am glad now I made that decision, for every time I visit this tiny plot of earth, I am reminded of my own mortality. I am reminded of my age—next spring I am eligible for social security—and that the passing days bring me closer to my resting-place beside my wife. I am reminded of time’s swift passage, that the hours left to me are sweeping past like the leaves falling right this moment from the maples on the street outside my door.
Instead of being fearful of what comes to all of us, I am now grateful for every day of my life. I love living and have so many things I still want to do: books I want to write, students I hope to teach, children and grandchildren, family and friends whose lives I want to share. For me, every day on this raucous, old planet is lagniappe, a wonderful gift, an opportunity to unwrap another package.
Besides, what truly is there to fear? We all must die, and it strikes me that only two possibilities exist for us after we cross the border into the realm of death. In the first scenario, we cease to exist. Once this thought horrified me, but no more. If death snuffs us out completely, then the effect will be that of cutting the lights on a stage at the end of a play. We will not be conscious. We will feel no more, think no more, dream no more. Such a negation may terrify us, though we already experience it in a small way whenever we sleep. Death then will simply be an eternal sleep.
The second possibility offers some sort of afterlife. For Christians, this vision of a life after death entails the eventual union of the soul with God (Heaven, preceded for most of us by Purgatory in Catholic theology) or the separation of the soul from God (Hell). Attaining heaven involves grace and the mercy of God. Hell is another proposition. It strikes me that hell must be composed only of those souls who refuse to ask for the mercy of God. We Christians believe that “God is Love” and that His mercy is boundless. In the Lord’s Prayer—called the Pater Noster or the Our Father by Catholics—there is the line “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Here God is asking us to do as God does, to forgive as He forgives. His great mercy allows sinners like myself to clutch at such straws with hope and faith.
Tomorrow is November 2nd, the day we Catholics honor our dead and pray for their souls. Tomorrow I will remember the courage of my mother and the love of my wife, and will pray for them. I will pray for the souls of those relatives and friends whose lives have marked me in some fashion and who now lie beneath the earth. And I will pray that when Death someday smiles at me, I will possess the guts and the sense of adventure to smile back.
That romantic view of death crossed the River Styx when I hit my mid-twenties and understood the finality of a visit from the Grim Reaper. I remember the exact moment I began to fear death. I was watching some movie—I can’t remember the name of the film—in a theater with my wife when one of the actors, Woody Allen, made a joke about dying and death. The audience laughed, but his comment hit me with the force of a hammer. I understood the comedian wasn’t joking. He was so brazenly speaking the truth about death that the audience found his comment funny. That’s when I truly knew I was someday going to die, and the thought terrified me.
For several years, this idea of extinction haunted me. Oh, don’t misunderstand me: I didn’t dwell on death, I didn’t become obsessed by my future demise, but always there occurred those solitary moments—at dawn, at three o’clock in the morning, in a car ride alone—when icy thoughts of death and oblivion would seize my imagination. Once, shortly after my thirtieth birthday, I added up the number of days remaining to me, were I to live to seventy, and was appalled by the low number of that calculation.
Then came a final shift in my views regarding the end of life. My mother died of liver cancer at a relatively young age, and in her passing she gave me as her last gift the ability to face and accept death. By then I had become a Christian—to be specific, a Catholic—and to watch my mother dying removed my lingering fears of death. She died at home in her own bed and in accordance with the tenets of her Protestant faith. She died surrounded by her family and by their prayers. She died nobly, bravely, and well.
Twelve years later, my wife died. Hers was a different sort of death. Kris collapsed from a brain aneurysm and never regained consciousness. She had no time to say goodbye to me or the children, no time for me ask her forgiveness for our quarrels over the years, no time for her to do anything but die.
For five days Kris was in a coma in the hospital in Asheville. On the fourth day, a nurse pulled me aside and said: “I notice your children keep praying for their mom. Don’t they understand she’s dying? You know she’s not going to get any better.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “They know she’s dying, and it’s true they’re praying for a miracle. But they’re also praying for the repose of her soul.”
Kris died in May. I remember little from that summer following her burial. I have no idea, for example, why I agreed to have my name engraved on that tombstone. The stonecutters suggested it, and I went along with them.
I am glad now I made that decision, for every time I visit this tiny plot of earth, I am reminded of my own mortality. I am reminded of my age—next spring I am eligible for social security—and that the passing days bring me closer to my resting-place beside my wife. I am reminded of time’s swift passage, that the hours left to me are sweeping past like the leaves falling right this moment from the maples on the street outside my door.
Instead of being fearful of what comes to all of us, I am now grateful for every day of my life. I love living and have so many things I still want to do: books I want to write, students I hope to teach, children and grandchildren, family and friends whose lives I want to share. For me, every day on this raucous, old planet is lagniappe, a wonderful gift, an opportunity to unwrap another package.
Besides, what truly is there to fear? We all must die, and it strikes me that only two possibilities exist for us after we cross the border into the realm of death. In the first scenario, we cease to exist. Once this thought horrified me, but no more. If death snuffs us out completely, then the effect will be that of cutting the lights on a stage at the end of a play. We will not be conscious. We will feel no more, think no more, dream no more. Such a negation may terrify us, though we already experience it in a small way whenever we sleep. Death then will simply be an eternal sleep.
The second possibility offers some sort of afterlife. For Christians, this vision of a life after death entails the eventual union of the soul with God (Heaven, preceded for most of us by Purgatory in Catholic theology) or the separation of the soul from God (Hell). Attaining heaven involves grace and the mercy of God. Hell is another proposition. It strikes me that hell must be composed only of those souls who refuse to ask for the mercy of God. We Christians believe that “God is Love” and that His mercy is boundless. In the Lord’s Prayer—called the Pater Noster or the Our Father by Catholics—there is the line “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Here God is asking us to do as God does, to forgive as He forgives. His great mercy allows sinners like myself to clutch at such straws with hope and faith.
Tomorrow is November 2nd, the day we Catholics honor our dead and pray for their souls. Tomorrow I will remember the courage of my mother and the love of my wife, and will pray for them. I will pray for the souls of those relatives and friends whose lives have marked me in some fashion and who now lie beneath the earth. And I will pray that when Death someday smiles at me, I will possess the guts and the sense of adventure to smile back.
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