When I was young I often used to sit in the evening with an old aunt while she told her rosary beads. I remember she once said to me that when each day was ending she always did two things – she looked back and thought how beautiful the day had been, remembering even the simplest things; and she thought about her death.
To a child it seemed a puzzling combination but she was a serene and joyful old lady and I assumed it was not a bad thing to do. Later, of course, I saw that there was religious significance in her evening thoughts that turned in two such different directions – praise God for the beauty of the day but remember also that such beauty passes away all too soon.
Now a strange thing is that when I remember that serene old lady talking about her own death I remember it did not seem morbid at all – it seemed natural, a commonplace of conversation. I do not think that talking like that about death happens much nowadays.
How often do any of us think about our own death? We read enough about death in the newspapers; we hear enough about death on the radio newscasts; we see more than enough of death on the television. But all this is death at third-hand, highly impersonal, far removed from us. Our own death is a different matter – we flinch away from that.
And it is not surprising that we do. There is a saying that there are two things a man cannot do -one is to gaze at the burning sun with our naked eye and the other is to gaze at his own death, that darker sun. Any of us can understand that. Personal extinction is terrible to contemplate. It is not easy, or comfortable to feel, for instance, that in some foreseeable time life will end – yet each of us can do an easy calculation and find, that perhaps with a cold shock of surprise, that the sum of our days is not so large after all, and there will be a time when mornings will come which we shall never see.
In some religions, including my own, the fear of death is associated with the threat of hell. But that is not the universal fear which simply is that there is no eternity of damnation, or bliss, but only emptiness, a cessation of being, a fear summoned up in a remark made by John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, to his brother Charles: “If I have any fear, it is not of falling into hell, but of falling into nothingness.”
To most people these will seem morbid thoughts – especially because death has become the new pornography, taking the place of sex years ago. Now it is somehow obscene to talk too openly about death. It is not an approved item for ordinary discussion. It does not enter into decent conversation – just as long ago sexual intercourse and female orgasm were considered unfit subjects of discussion in mixed company. Death is the taboo subject of the modern age.
Yet I believe that it is important that a man thinks sometimes about death coming to him. And, I should add, I do not say this particularly for religious reasons. Indeed, I sometimes think that formal religion, religion of the textbook, deals with death in a way that muddles and muffles its true significance.
There are three essential things about death. First, it is inevitable. This, of course, is stating the obvious – but the fact is that most of us go through life as if we had endless time to live. We therefore fritter away our days as if they were not by far the most valuable gifts we have, gifts swiftly passing through our hands as if we did not care since they are without number. But such gifts are not without number.
The second thing about death is that it is final. I can understand the comfort-seekers who hide from this truth behind thoughts of God-given immortality. But I am always alarmed at the weakness of their intellectual argument. I try my hardest to believe but the fact is that only sublime faith can truly believe in life after death – and only the greatest mystics have had such faith. All else is simply comfort-seeking.
The third and most significant thing about death is that it gives purpose and point and spice and heightened value to life itself. We do not live forever, so the life we have is unutterably precious. We should treat it so – our own lives and the lives of others. Every moment we are fortunate enough to have should be lived to the full – whatever we happen to be doing. Do not be like the old man in C.P. Cavafy’s poem who sits thinking how little he enjoyed the years when he had strength and wit and looks:
He knows he’s very old now: sees it, feels it.
Yet it seems he was young just yesterday.
The time’s gone by so quickly, gone by so quickly.
And he thinks how discretion fooled him,
how he always believed, so stupidly,
that cheat who said: ‘Tomorrow. You have plenty of
time.’
And it is therefore right to think sometimes of our own death coming – life becomes that more sweet and vivid and the smaller, gossipy, foolish, irritating things of life fade away then into utter insignificance.
