Of Death
These last few days, I have been
reflecting quite a bit about death. Two friends of mine have lost a sister
each, my sons friends lost a father and I have just received the news of a
former teacher’s death. Therefore the
thought of death has been in my mind.
I have had a fairly intense
experience with death having lost both my own parents more that sixteen years
ago. And experiencing death at close
quarters in never a pleasant experience, even the death of a stranger by the
side of the road. Death has a way of
shocking us into a freeze, making us wonder what it must be like for the person
who has died and for those who were close family and friends, whether they were
in pain and how much pain, whether they had “put their affairs in order” or even
whether they have gone to the afterlife.
However, my sense is that deaths
greatest tool of fear against us is the timing…. Death has a sneaky way of
coming when it is least expected… a way of keeping its mystic by never giving a
time and a day when it will come … so it keeps us guessing… and then it
suddenly shows up. Even for those who
are terminally ill, death sneaks around giving false hope for days, months, or
even years… and then it sneaks in and strikes … we even use the word “strikes”
to add to the drama even when someone has died quite peacefully …. And it every
time shocks us into a freeze.
Incidentally one of life’s main outcomes
is death. A favorite saying goes that “the key cause of death is life”.
Everyone will die at some point or other. The bible refers to a life expectancy of
seventy years and anything beyond that being a bonus. We seem to falsely think and believe that one
of our main objectives of life is to live for a long time, even if in deep
pain, – even when we know that will still
come to an end. So we go into all manner
of health, financial, insurance and physical investments to keep death at
bay. I recently read a story of a man
who had stayed vegetarian all is life - to keep healthy- who was now well over
a hundred years old, and was wondering whether it was all worth it.
One of the tools I have learnt of
dealing with uncertainty is scenario thinking.
It allows you to think “what if” around various possibilities and think
through what each of the scenarios would result in, and how life would look
like in that scenario. In the case of
death, death is certain. The only
uncertainty is timing. Therefore, if you
could think “what if” with the timing, what would this result in? What if I died today, or tomorrow? What if XYZ (insert name) died today, or
tomorrow, what would this result in? How
would life unfold in this scenario? Or
even what if I (or XYZ) died in forty years?
Or sixty? This may sound morbid
but it is not different with similar messages that tell us to keep our “I love
you”s current, because you don’t know when you, or the person you love will be
gone. However in this case, scenario
thinking about death removes death’s overbearing power of timing from us. In
other words, one of the ways to remove deaths power over us, is to expect it
any time, all the time. Then we are free
to go on with the rest of our lives.
So, the next time you hear that
someone has died, ask yourself whether the shock would be less if you had
thought through this scenario. Indeed, that explains why people in Quarter 4
are never shocked about news of death; to them death is much more certain and
is less of a scare.
