In the United States, and I suspect in other nations as well (though by no means everywhere), death is considered very taboo and to be avoided at all costs. This isn't necessarily openly declared so much as it is implied. There are a few pockets of discussions here and there about quality of life versus quantity of days, but overall the general meme adopted by us in Westernized nations is that death must be voided; it is a gaping black hole to be feared and is never something to be embraced.
We have, in fact, marginalized death and dying to the point that our terminally ill are cramped into small white rooms in hospitals and/or hospice centers, where doctors and nurses frantically monitor vitals: pulse, blood pressure, oxygen levels, and so on, all while maintaining a vow of silence over the ultimate and inevitable end. Dr. Seamus Mahoney wrote a great work on this, if anyone cares to read it, and I highly recommend it.
What I don't want to do, though is examine all the wrong turns we have taken and how wrong things look. I will let is suffice to say that in Westernized nations death is very marginalized. We all know that it is only a matter of time before we're gone. But we don't talk about it. We mustn't think about it. We must make sure that we keep the machine of economy turning, so we cannot pause to appreciate the inevitability of our demise.
But the question really is: what do we do about that? I believe there are a few things we can do that will start to change this.
Letting Go of the Fictional Narrative of Security
One of the very first steps we need to take before re-examine our relationship with death is to look at our current cultural worldview of security and safety. We are currently living in a snug little bubble of security: we believe (erroneously) that our economy, our nation, and our way of life are secure - it is immune by virtue of this security from outside threats. And when things like a pandemic happen (sound familiar?) we must batten down the hatches to make it more secure - because anything that comes against this security is an enemy and must be swiftly dealt with. You can
read more about this perspective here, but the point I want to make is that we have to stop looking at our world as secure. Because it isn't.
The Dark Mountain project describes our currently world (and by world, I mean this installment of it, the place where we see ourselves as comfy and secure) as a place that's much like walking on lava: the top of the surface appears intact, and it seems solid and indestructible, but the least little pressure on it will cause it to collapse, and down into the molten flow we tumble. This isn't opinion; it's a fact. Examples like the recent floods in Kentucky demonstrate that our infrastructure and indeed, our very way of life, can fall like matchsticks beneath the weight of a planet whose forces are far beyond the scope of our control.
Mostly, we respond to these events by creating tighter controls on who can do what: regulations that seek to protect and preserve, even when the costs of doing so create significant burdens on people and the planet. But we already know that this creates an environment where we heard our sick and elderly off to places where we can't catch what they carry (or vice versa). But we also already know that this isn't the right approach, because we are yet further divided by it.
Instead, what if we embrace the idea that nothing is secure? What if we decide that security - for all its false prettiness - really is an illusion? What if we decide not to follow the alluring scent with which is seduces us? What if, instead, we look into the darkened undergrowth of the forest and say to ourselves "wonder what's in there?" No matter what we tell ourselves, we can't know the road ahead. It hasn't been lived yet. Why not embrace the fact that we don't know? Why not celebrate it? If we embrace this concept, instead of fighting against it, our views on death and dying will change dramatically.
Learning to Live Intentionally
Another way we can begin to de-stigmatize death and dying is to learn how to actually live. I suspect very few of us actually do this. A great many of our number are simply breathing and calling it a life. And that's a reasonable response to living within the confines of an artificial construct such as the walled-in culture we're surrounded by. However, escaping this is very simple: simply pull your attention from where it wanders back into the present moment and feel yourself living. Experience yourself seeing the world and its glorious bio-systems as you live and breathe in it.
A number of my colleagues label this technique as meditation. I can neither agree nor disagree on that - but too often meditation implies the withdrawing of oneself to a quiet, calm space free of distractions. While such retreat has significant merit for personal seclusion and growth, you can exercise your intentional living right in the middle of a busy, noisy street if you choose. And by the way, intentional living has nothing to do with the mode in which you execute your daily tasks, nor the manner in which you earn your living, nor the religion to which you subscribe,
like this article might suggest.
If we are able to master this simple method of intentional living, we will be present in most all of our moments, and we will no longer fear the end of those moments, because our lives are the fullest they can be at each moment along the way.
Seeing Possibilities
One other way we can move beyond the taboo of death and dying is to start seeing possibilities. This may not sound related at all, but the recent pandemic debacle is a fine example. Instead of the polarizing us-versus-them division that we allowed it to create, we could have just as easily chosen to view it as an opportunity to reduce our division and separation, and instead see it as an opportunity to readjust our narrow bandwidth and embrace one another in love. Overall, I don't think we saw much success with this, but what about the next disaster that strikes us? What will happen when we encounter the next pandemic, or the next plague, or the next large-scale natural disaster? Famine? Tsunamis? Earthquakes? These are all very real elements of our world. We have the possibility of choosing to see them differently. It's time we learned to do that.
These three steps can make take us an enormous distance toward the goal of de-marginalizing death. We can move beyond the fear of it and see if for what it is: a part of our life here on this lovely little backwater planet at the edge of this quaint little galaxy called the Milky Way.
Accepting death - or maybe even embracing it - is part of the way of native medicine. It is the practice of something larger than oneself - something that can connect and inspire us all. I will talk more about death and dying (and consciousness) in a future post, where I'll examine grief and the relationship of the living to those that pass on.
