I’ve struggled to write following my last post. I mean, where to go after death? Death has happened to someone I love and with whom I would share all my news. This leaves a void that I cannot avoid. Yet in the mix of resuming my usual responsibilities, I find myself attempting to do just that. Trying to avoid the unavoidable void. (That’s a lot of voids!)
Death is literally everywhere. Whilst it’s not always a physical passing of someone, it appears in many guises through endings, change and loss. It is an unavoidable part of being alive. No one can avoid or dodge this reality. Including me.
Despite my past weeks’ best efforts at avoidance, I’ve heard about death within my practice, I’ve seen it in the nakedness of nature and it’s been there in the films I’ve watched; Nicholas Gift and Darkest Hour. It’s all around us. It’s part of life.
When I stop avoiding and look back, I see how the process of dying was eased for the one going through it, by the presence of those who love her, accompanying her on the journey.
I was struck through this by the reminder of the simple truth that what makes the unbearable bearable, is the love of those around you.
I reflected upon how this is not just true in the face of death but also for every trial and trauma of life. What makes the losses, the changes, the endings, the challenges, the fears, faceable, is having people around us that will simply be there with us. It doesn’t always have to be physically, but just knowing there are people around for us should we need them. This is what makes life not just bearable, but liveable.
Within my own friendships, it is those individuals who offer a place at their dinner table, or who pop in with flowers or who reassure me that I can call or come over if I want to, or who just sit with me whilst I weep, that help me to feel that I’m ok. That I can walk through this post death void. That I can bear the loss, the absence, the unfillable gap. That I can and will learn to adjust, without just avoiding or distracting. For it is these people that show me that I am loved and not alone.
I can’t help but wonder if we must wait for death, to draw closer to one another. Or whether we can apply death’s lessons to our living now.
As I reflect upon this I realise that it is death that exposes our vulnerability. It strips us of all pretence. There is no option to just be strong. No hiding place for our frailties, fragility, needs or limitations. No chance to feed our delusions of invincibility or to keep up appearances. In death, we are all released from the prison of stiff upper lipped thinking and living. For in death we are laid bare in all our vulnerable humanity, just as in birth.
In contrast, life can become one long culture driven exercise in hiding the very vulnerability that makes us human. We can learn to clothe our naked humanity in strength and self-sufficiency, blind to the truth that these characteristics can delude and divide us from our need for God and each other. We do of course need these qualities but without the balance of human weakness and interdependency, we cannot remain whole.
What if we were to admit our human vulnerabilities during the time in between birth and death? To actually acknowledge our shared human frailties in life and to support one another accordingly. For isn’t this how we truly connect with one another? Through admission and confession of our vulnerability and pain, not just our strengths and achievements?
There is a vulnerability surrounding death that can actually bring us closer together. A vulnerability that our culture dangerously dismisses as weakness, in life. But such thinking serves merely to succeed in keeping us within isolated prisons of pretence. And it is only in honesty and unity that we can all remain free to continue to heal, grow and live fully and whole heartedly irrespective of the deaths and endings that meet us along the way.
Life brings deaths, endings and pain.
Pretence about this creates barriers.
Vulnerability tears them down.
And only in vulnerability can we continue to truly meet one another in love, both in life and in death.
Let us not wait for death, to admit to the shared vulnerability of our humanity. None of us can choose how we will die but all of us can choose with whom and how we will live.
