Damn death. Aretha is gone. Anthony Bourdain is gone. Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon is gone. Rev.Dr. James Cone is gone. My mother and father and sister are gone. Someone’s child or children are gone, or someone’s husband or wife or grandmother or brother or best friend …is gone.
Death be damned as well as the diseases and situations that cause death. That sentiment is known and adhered to by many. But it’s not healthy.
We all know that death is a part of life, just as failure is a necessary component of success, but when death comes it is woefully unconcerned with how we will feel as our loved one is snatched from us.
It is little wonder that the poet John Donne wrote his classic “Death Be Not Proud,” known as Holy Sonnet 10. He no doubt had borne his share of sorrow, thanks to the intrusion of Death in his daily life. His poem argues against the power of Death, which apparently thinks more highly of itself than Donne thinks it should. He writes:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones and souls’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell,
And poppy’or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou, then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
And so Donne attempts to take the sting out of death by relying on the Christian belief in eternal life. Death does not win.
But regardless of one’s religious beliefs and the capacity to visualize the loved one who has died being in heaven, the fact of the matter is that when Death comes, we who are left behind are frazzled. The hole left in our lives when a loved one – someone in our family, a close friend, or a public figure who has impacted us- is immense. And the hole gets deeper as time goes on, allowing the side effects of death – loneliness, anger, confusion, anguish – to get worse before we get the capacity to cope without falling apart.
In the last few months, people who I have known personally have died, and a couple of public figures to whom I had an attachment …” went to be with the Lord,” as we say in the Black Church. Today the country and the world are coping with the death of Aretha Franklin, an immensely talented woman who gave the world beautiful music for decades. Last week, for me, it was a female scholar and theologian and a couple of months before her it was a male theologian and scholar whose work has impacted the lives of “the least of these” since the 1970s. Before then it was CNN personality Anthony Bourdain and for some, the death of Charlotte Rae knocked the air out of their lungs.
Those are recent deaths, but the gaping hole comes anytime someone to whom we are close is taken by Death from beyond our reach. Some people find themselves trapped by the pain caused by death for literally years. We “grow accustomed” to having people around; we get used to their presence, their ways, their voices, their smiles, and even the things, in the cases of personal loss, the habits of theirs that we found irritating.
“The hole” is like a giant pot which holds our memories, sights, sounds, words and laughter of the ones who have gone, and while our grief is raw ,we are not comforted. Death does not have power over the one who has passed on, but Death wreaks havoc in ourpersonal spaces. It has no regard for our feelings; it remains an uninvited guest in our spirits until it is ready to leave.
As a pastor, I have stood beside anguished family members as they have watched their loved one transition from the temporal to the spiritual realm. I have told them to continue to talk to their loved one as he or she slips further and further away from them toward a spirit-life to which we have not yet been called. I have told them to talk to them (the sense of hearing is supposedly the last of our senses to go), and to touch them, and to tell them how much they are loved. It will make it easier for the one who is dying to let go, I have shared, if they have the feeling that those who are being left behind will be all right.
We work hard to do that, but we frequently do not succeed. We are not all right when Death swoops into our spaces. We struggle to hold onto our loved one for as long as we can because the thought of the emptiness that will be ours is unbearable to think about. Death’s main character- Grief – is like a pesky fly, but one which not only flies and buzzes in our ears, but which bites as well. Memories catch us unaware; we grow worried if, after death, we find that we cannot visualize the face of the one who has gone on. We can be “all right” one second and then pass a place which was a favorite for ourselves and the one that passed, or we can hear someone talking whose voice is eerily like the one of our deceased loved one, and we go careening down into that hole, again and again and again.
I write this today because someone knows exactly what I am talking about. I write it because a fair number of people are deeply sad because of the death of Aretha Franklin. I write it because someone lost his or her mother or father, and I write it because parents who have lost children are groping to find sunshine in days which always seem overcast because their child or children are gone.
I write this because a whole lot of people are in holes of sadness caused by the death of someone important to them. I know about those holes; my mother, father and sister died from cancer. The holes left by their passing are now not as deep as they once were, but they are still there.
Death has no power over the one who has gone; that’s what the religion of many says, but death wields its power over us who are left behind with abandon. Death does not care if our hearts feel like they will burst from the pain. Death gets an easy chair and plops it right in the middle of our grieving spirits.
Death loses its sting after a while, but it leaves permanent scars. There is no way around it. Some of us are still deeply pained by someone we lost years ago. Death invades our peace and shatters the normalcy of life we have known.
Death is a part of life. The prayers we utter should not be for those who have passed on; as Donne says, “one short sleep past, we wake eternally.” For the one who has passed, there is peace, but for those of us left behind, Death reminds us that it has taken up residence in places to which it had not been invited…and as we protest and writhe with pain, Death ignores us.
We are blessed to be able to “connect” with our lost loved ones via pictures and videos and even old voicemails. In so doing, we neutralize some of the sting of Death’s bite into our souls.
But Death tempts us to fall into despair and to stay there. To our credit, we fight back. The power of death’s grip is lessened, and we go on, limping and bruised but going on nonetheless, able to give thanks for the time we had with the one who has gone on. That thanksgiving is the antidote to the pain caused by the raw pain of Death, and when we get to that point, we at least neutralize Death’s presence and reality.
We force a tie in a battle we never wanted to fight. It is then that we can smile, even as we continue to sometimes find ourselves in tears, because the power of remembering the one who has passed is greater than the lure of Death’s helpers for us to stay enmeshed in raw sorrow.
We learn, in the words of the hymn ‘Come Ye Disconsolate” that “earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal,” and when we internalize that truth, Death is relegated to the closet of “life experiences” that are a part of the lives of all of us.
A candid observation …
Candid Observations 