This has been a death-obsessed year for me, and no fun. Actually it’s been a couple of those years, starting in 2009. It has become an intrusive preoccupation. I reread some of my contributions on these pages and I seem stuck on the subject. Death shows up in only five of thirty-three articles; six of thirty-four if you count this piece. That’s like, what, sixteen percent? Not so bad, really, given that it looms so large in my mind. Yet I remember thinking while writing the other eighty-four percent, “At least I’m not talking about death.” 
I want to dismiss this as the usual self-referential Baby Boomer blather. My generation can’t keep its mouth shut about what’s obsessing us: the latest drug trip, the War (Vietnam; has there been any other?), “my search for meaning,” and how it all makes us feel and why our feelings should be ever so important to everyone. Maybe that’s where my rumination falls.
Now, as we’re turning mid-sixtyish scooting on to seventyish, we obsess about home accessibility issues—hand rails, re-fitted showers, ramps, and chair lifts, for ourselves or an elderly parent, and what those might do to home values if we ever need to sell.
And death; we’re thinking about that, too. People I’ve known since childhood and several dear friends have died all since 2009, and my widowed father with end-stage renal failure recently has taken up residence with us. It’s working out okay, him being here, though he has found things to worry about—our youngest kid reaching high school safely, or the possible perils the other kid might encounter going to work after college classes. He also frets when our dog upon rare occasion won’t sit in his lap. He is happiest with the dog draped over his legs. It is an affront to his affection when she decides to hop up next to anybody else. I’m glad for these things; he hasn’t yet entirely detached himself from life.
Still, he is dying. He has refused dialysis. I would too were I ninety-one but that doesn’t diminish the prospect of losing a second parent within a year of having lost the first.
Steve Jobs would tell me not to sweat it: “Death is life’s change agent,” he told some Stanford graduates. “It clears out the old to make way for the new.” Is that all it is? Well, hooray, let’s all just get over it and pack it in for the next group. Jobs had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the time of those remarks; certainly there is something impressively stoical in his words. But there is no comfort in them.
So maybe I’ll turn instead to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ tried and true five stages of grief. Psychologizing death represents a sophistication that eluded Jobs. We have here a handy guide for marking mental states as we trace our own or someone else’s decline—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I think I’m hovering between anger and depression, watching friends and family die. But check back later; I may cycle through a couple others.
Maybe I could place my experience as caregiver somewhere in the grief process too. Looking after my father has required me to surrender my pastoral work off in Gothenburg, on the edge of Nebraska’s Sand Hills. I was surprised at how desperately I relished the parish work I was doing, especially as I confronted the growing awareness I could not do it anymore. My father would need care and I, as the only child, had to take up the task. It wasn’t a hard choice, merely a necessary one. But I am reminded of a title Gilbert Meilaender once used, I Want to Burden My Loved Ones. I think that’s working out pretty well in this case. Caregiver-wise I’m at, let’s see, bargaining and acceptance. (Never mind the bargain.)
The big thing in the five steps is avoiding denial. Denial is not a good place to be. Everyone should try really hard to process his grief and get beyond denial as soon as possible. And it is all a process, we’re told. Find the right dials to twist and it’s hunky-dory.
But is it only a process, clicking through clinical stages to resolution? I am not so certain of that; never was. Those persuasively clinical assessments we adopt as proven clichés deserve a deeply critical reappraisal. I don’t think death and grief and mourning, loss and bereavement can be processed so glibly. Besides, psychologizing death, packaging it categorically, getting a handle on it, isn’t all that just a variety of—sorry, what other word will do—denial?
“Time,” after all, “like an ever-rolling stream soon bears us all away.” We harbor some hope as to where it may bear us, but I can’t think into what psychologized category that would fall.
Russell E. Saltzman is an online homilist for Christian Leadership Center at the University of Mary, and author of The Pastor’s Page and Other Small Essays. His previous On the Square articles can be found here.
RESOURCES
Steve Jobs’ remarks at Stanford
Gilbert Meilaender, I Want To Burden My Loved Ones
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Comments:
Thanks so much for this meditation on death and dying: I can never get enough! I will try as best I can to keep my response down to a minimum, for I could go on and on with this.
Ernest Becker’s book, The Denial of Death, was a revelation for me when I first read it, long before I returned to the Church, and he argued persuasively that all fears and the neuroses that grow out of them are founded in the fear of death. Death entered the world at the Fall, and its agonizing and all-pervasive problem persists, and for Christians there is only one legitimate (all-encompassing) answer that escaped Jobs and Kubler-Ross: the Resurrection.
Yes, Steve Job’s answer fails miserably on two counts: 1) It’s not an answer, and 2) It reveals to what length even the most intelligent of us can dip into denial with blatant mediocrity.
I have two responses to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages: 1) The curious absence of these stages in the lives of the saints as well as many who were close to them, beginning with Stephen in Acts. 2) Bob Fosse’s brilliant and beautifully self-absorbed auto-biographical film, All That Jazz, the best and most hilarious critique of the ultimately empty (in the face of Death) five stages you are likely to find. This serves to remind us that Death, like evil and a promised after-life, remains a mystery.
I quipped the other day to someone with whom I was discussing Death that “We are all on death row.” I didn’t go on to explain that at age 20 I was headed there. In a news conference with reporters, the prosecutor said, “If I don’t put Costello in the electric chair, I will resign from office as prosecutor.” Soon after my arrest I had planned what I was convinced would be a successful escape, where I and three others would go on to rob banks until we were gunned down—at least that’s where I was headed, and it was on the other three to decide to exit before that happened. The bars were cut, the escape car and guns were ready, and the person I trusted most (whom police tried to kill when they captured him in a hotel: he had to jump out the window, taking 5 bullets) ratted me out, and he was freed for doing so. In the hole I mysteriously let go and embraced death row as my fate and I consciously, deliberately, began preparing for my death (which included a year of epic dreams where I would be executed by every means I had ever heard of, an essentially bio-chemical process that would physically adapt me to the inevitable: I didn‘t want to suffer the humiliation of shaking and possibly peeing my pants when I was taken to the chair, for I had always feared humiliation more than death, for in a number of circumstances I had opted for death over humiliation).
I miracle saved me from death row, and another miracle released me from prison ten years later at age 30. I can now look back on those early teen years, beginning at age 13 when I made the radical commitment to the drug culture, determined to stay high 24 hours a day, and see the logic in my decision: for until my daughter arrived and I made a radical commitment to loving her, which expedited my return to Our Lord at age 38, drugs WERE better than everything else. I was the Drug Culture’s warrior in arms, never half-stepping! When I was age 16 a detective asked me, “Why do you use heroin?” And I replied, “It’s better than everything else.” And he surprised me with his come-back: “I can’t kick my curiosity about that. I sometimes get close to trying it, just to know what it’s like.” And I said, “Be careful…you got a lot more than I got to be disillusioned about.”
I was given a death sentence by a doctor 6 years ago: “Your liver is in the last stage; you’re going to need a transplant.” You see, at age 15, I and 15 other kids I knew all contracted hepatitis A, B and C. Through the years they all died except Walt, my best friend, and me. Walt died about 3 months ago. And the strange thing was that I was in worse shape than any of them (almost dead in Roosevelt Hospital in New York in 1964: my skin had went from yellow to brown before I passed out on a sidewalk in Manhattan). Six years ago when the doctor told me I needed a transplant, I was engaged. My fiancé still wanted to get married, and she would as long as I did everything the doctors told me to do. And I kept hearing that Bob Dylan line in my head: “He ain’t busy being born, is busy dying!” I didn’t want to be busy dying. I wanted to spend all my lucid time with my grandchild (two more arrived after him). I wanted him to know that he had a grandpa who loved him dearly, and to do that I would spend every second I could find to be with him.
Just the other day I realized that I had never stopped preparing for my death since age 20 (I’m almost 65). And I’m realizing more and more what a great sense of humor God has. Finally I no longer have to prepare. I just have to willfully place myself in a position of being a conduit of God’s love, a God who knows like we can never really know that Death is a good friend taking us home (Death being defeated is simply a removal of his scary mask), our real home where we will no longer be aliens in a strange, violent and fear-based land, and in any given second that I don’t love, I have two choices: 1) find that book by Kubler-Ross, or turn back to Our Lord who is Love absolute.
(@Mr Cosello: Whew, close call. Just lost my Uncle to a bad liver a couple of weeks ago.)
We boomers do blather a bit, don't we? I must be a couple of years your junior
and it seems clearer to me each day that I need to keep silent more, stop going on about things and abide more in the Lord. Again, thanks.