the New Pantagruel

Dying by Degrees

by William Luse

he recent sorrow of a friend at the loss of his mother put me strangely in mind of the goodbye I bid my daughter when she hopped into her car on Saturday for the long drive back to college. The two seem hardly parallel, for mine was small and temporary (or so I prayed) while that other sorrow was the Big Goodbye. But, as my wife pointed out later, these little goodbyes do not get easier with repetition, and that’s probably because we sense something over which we’d rather not linger: the little ones are preludes to the Big One. We spend all our lives saying goodbye to each other, and then one day one of the parties to the ritual doesn’t show up anymore. Sometimes it’s expected, sometimes it isn’t. We are resigned to the former, and jolted by the latter; either way, it seems hard to get close to the mystery.

We are admonished to ponder daily the four last things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell. After avoiding the unpleasantness of number one, I’m pretty good with the last three. Numbers two and four aren’t a worry, because I’ve always presumed God’s mercy, for me if not for others. Number three provides fertile ground for hours of dreamlike reverie, as long as we don’t recall too often Newman’s reminder of how difficult it is to get there, that the nature of sin is this: it and God cannot be together. It’s number one that gives us grief and misery.

It’s the nature of Nature that becomes the stumbling block; to imagine ourselves without ourselves, as not ourselves, seems like something we ought not have to do, a task only a hard master would assign. You would think the deaths of others would assist us in this labor, but they don’t. The event may get us to thinking, but we end up putting it off to another day because we just can’t get to the bottom of it. Life in the body is all we know; it’s a cruelty to have to give it up. We can’t even imagine it, though we try endlessly, and worse, we can’t accept it. I’ve heard there are some who can, saints, I suppose. More than accept it, they welcome it. So I hear. I don’t happen to be in their company yet.

Have you ever been in such straits that you feared you might die? And were you afraid, petrified even? And did you plead with God, abjectly, to spare you? Ah, so we have something in common. It’s all right. Even Christ was afraid in the Garden, or gave a good likeness of it. And when you recovered, how gratified were you to know that the bullet was not meant for you? Very? I was. But it won’t make me less fearful the next time. When we hear that someone has died in an accident or in war, why is it we want the details to confirm that he, or she, “did not suffer?”

It’s not just the physical pain. We can all put up with that for a while, especially if we think we might come out alive on the other end. It’s rather that other pain, the mental one, the one that does not merely feel what’s happening, but knows.

When we watch others die we experience many things – sorrow, empathy, prayerfulness, charity, helplessness, loss, even anger – but the one thing we do not experience is fear. We are like the witnesses to Ivan Illyich’s agony: it is a terrible thing, but, thank God, it’s not me. After all, there’s nothing to be done about it, and life calls me away. In one of his books, Dietrich von Hildebrand remarks upon how poorly we participate in the deaths of others. I think he was on to something.

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