The Art of Dying

Is death really a taboo in our society? It’s a strong word, taboo, and I don’t know that it’s the right one. If there is a reluctance to confront death it is just as likely that it is because we are all having such fun being alive and feeling healthy. Reaper G is a spoilsport. If we turn our faces from the old curmudgeon, I don’t know that that isn’t an entirely natural thing to do.

For all that, we owe it to ourselves to get our heads around it. It’s all about taking responsibility. We have to rehearse the deaths of those we love in our imagination if we are ever to be able to cope with them. And we have to rehearse our own death, work out how we feel about it and imagine how others will feel about it—and, yes, talk about it, prepare them.

We owe it to ourselves to preserve ourselves from helplessness and hopelessness and dependency (not to mention the well intentioned ministrations of a Cruse volunteer).

So I liked Dan Cruickshank’s encounter with death on the BBC, and I applaud another programme which, however imperfectly, deals with the subject seriously and contemplatively—with what Sister Wendy called “a breathless, a fearful wonder and joy at what will happen after death.”

There’s no definitive take on this. It’s all well beyond the grasp of reason, so let’s just clear the deck of academics. To blunder about for a bit is the best it gets.

Watch Dan blundering about here.

Prison hospice

Prisons are places where people are defined by the worst thing they’ve ever done. The stigma sticks for the rest of their lives.

We, free people define ourselves by the best we can be. If we hate sinners it is because we are not as they.

But we are. There is darkness in all of us. It is only its unenactedness that separates us, and it’s only self-restraint or inhibition or luck that has held us back. That’s not a firewall, it’s a skein. All wickedness is weakness. There, but for the grace…

Our hatred of sinners is a species of self-loathing born of fear. We are all the same, the best and the worst of us, brothers and sisters under the skin. Our natures comprise beauty and ugliness, a potential for admirable aspiration and for grievous self-betrayal.

So we shouldn’t be surprised to see the beauty of the human spirit manifest itself in the worst of people, neither should we be surprised at its loveliness, for it is born of suffering.

The photo above of prisoners massaging a terminally ill inmate was shot in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where 85 per cent of the inmates will die in jail. See the rest of this extraordinary sequence here.

The Good Funeral Guide
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