Tuesday, April 21, 1998
Death leaves questions life can’t solve
DEATH: Religion a way to address uncertainty, calm fears with
afterlife
If you had died yesterday, where would you be today? You may
think you’d be in Heaven. Perhaps Hell. Maybe you’d be reunited
with your loved ones in eternal bliss. Or is that the same thing as
Heaven?
If you’re like me, you think you’d be hanging out underground,
surrounded by dirt and creepy crawlies. Yuck. But you probably
wouldn’t be thinking "Yuck." I doubt you’d be thinking anything.
Can it be true that when you die, you cease to think? You cease to
be?
Is this too morbid for you? It is perhaps a bit too morbid for
me. We’re much too young to be thinking about death, yes? You’re
right. Let’s get back to the really important stuff, like what neat
bid we hope to receive from Gamma Alpha Gamma (GAG).
Sorry, not today. Today we turn to real life …
It’s one of those signals that something is really wrong, those
middle-of-the-night phone calls. If someone calls in the early
morning hours, an awful thing must have happened. I usually get
such calls at 5:15 a.m. because my early-rising, crew-rowing
roommate is not downstairs on time, and her carpool buddies ring up
from the lobby. And no matter how many times they call, the ring in
the dark terrifies me. What’s the emergency? Usually it’s just that
my lazy roommie hasn’t gotten her ass out of bed, so I stumble in
the darkness to wake her up.
But this time it wasn’t the crew carpool. And I wasn’t even at
school. I was at home, lying in my dad’s bed, and he was calling
from New York in the early morning to tell me that my grandmother
had died.
Granny was the matriarch of my dad’s side of the family. She had
five children, 15 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Twenty-three people stemmed from her seed. Since her husband died
10 years ago, I had always seen her as the leader, the one at the
top of the family hierarchy.
If Granny wanted her purse, you ran to get it. If Granny needed
to sit down, you willingly got up from your chair.
After battling ovarian cancer for a number of years, Granny is
gone. Just last year, when I visited her in New York, she was
walking around, joking, telling me stories about her days as a
defiant young girl in the Brooklyn school system in the 1920s. The
1920s. Can we even comprehend what life was like during that time?
I always depended on Granny to tell me. Now who will recount the
tales?
With her death comes the typical sense of relief; she had been
deteriorating slowly for a long time. She refused any medicine and
even checked herself out of the hospital twice. No tubes, no shots,
she insisted – just her dignity. So she died in my aunt’s house,
with my dad sitting next to her.
And now my dad can come home. And now my dad can stop going to
New York every three days. And now I can stop driving home to San
Diego every weekend to take care of my younger siblings while he’s
in New York, and my mother stage-manages a theater production back
East. Now we can all rest.
And Granny can rest.
My dad barely made it to New York in time to see her go. He
spent the first Passover Seder with us in San Diego on Friday
night, but took a red-eye flight at 10:30 p.m. after doing Seder
dishes. He brought some latkes in a Tupperware container for Granny
and my aunt to enjoy at the second Seder. Hours later, she passed
away, Jewish music in the background.
One last Passover, one last Shabbat, one last breath.
And then I had to explain it to my siblings, including the same
little brother who had told me a few weeks before that he hoped
Granny could come to his Bar Mitzvah next year. At the time, I
didn’t have the heart to tell him that the rest of us were merely
hoping she could make it to our cousin’s wedding in three short
weeks. She will not be at the wedding or the Bar Mitzvah. And how
will we have a wedding or a Bar Mitzvah without her?
I saw myself going through the motions I had only read about in
books.
Disbelief, sadness, retrospect. I immediately thought back to
the last words I had said, the last conversation we had.
Ironically, she had consoled me when I called my dad in New York in
hysterics after learning that Mean Murphy had put a hold on my
records, and all my classes would be dropped in 13 hours. Barely
breathing, she came on the phone and told me that things would be
okay. And all I could think about was how impossible it would be to
re-enroll in those 21 units …
Death itself doesn’t scare me, it saddens me. And immense
sadness scares me. What will I do when my own parents die? What
will you do? Can you imagine life without your mom or dad? True,
most of us are still semi-dependent on them, but even when we’re
not, won’t we still be? The very womb out of which you came, the
heart that pumped your blood, the hands that fed you, bathed you,
even scolded you – now limp and still. And how do you go on? How do
you get up the next day and go to work or school?
Sometimes death seems so very real, so close. Maybe for you it
comes late at night when you lie alone in your bed, surrounded by
silence. "Is this what it’s like to die?" you think. No noise, no
movement?
We cannot help but contemplate death, precisely because its true
meaning is unknown. And it’s so final. We hate to think that
existence will truly be over, that our once-jubilant bodies will
lay stiff in a box, surrounded by dirt and potato bugs.
Enter religion. Good ol’ religion, the ancient force that had
the power to divide before we even knew what race was. Religion,
the cause of death and destruction, faith and healing. We look to
religion to conquer our fears of death.
It is hard for me to say this, especially after one of my own
loved ones has died, but perhaps to die is to die. Religion may be
merely a way of consoling ourselves. It is sad, but it is life. And
much of life is sad. (And isn’t that why we need religion? To keep
us from being so sad?)
In short, we might be cowards. Can we not face up to the
possibility that life truly does end, that we have about 80 years
here to do all that we hope and dream to do? Once we die, there’s
no turning back, is there?
Carpe Diem, live in the now, make the most of it, blah, blah …
These words were uttered for a reason. It is possible – probable –
that I, too, will turn to spirituality as I near my end. No one
wants to admit the end is upon them.
But can I ignore my logic, the science I’ve been taught about
water, atoms, cells, molecules, synapses? We work due to the
interaction between molecules and electrical impulses, right? So we
break when this interaction ends.
Some people insist that our spirit or soul will go somewhere.
Pray, do tell, where that somewhere is. I’d like to hang out there
for a day. Can’t I go just to see if I’ll like it? I mean, if I am
going to spend all of eternity in this rockin’ place, I want to
pick the good bed.
Yet I admit religion is important. I myself am laced with
contradictions. I, too, am as imperfect as you. My theories are
still being formed. I am a practicing Jew, more culturally than
spiritually. Is that possible? (I hope my Rabbi isn’t reading.) And
yes, there are a great many benefits to religion. It gives people
strength, a community, a place, things which are so important in
today’s fragmenting society (or is religion a cause of today’s
fragmenting society?).
Overall, we all want to be happy. The founding fathers
emphasized the pursuit of happiness (while the founding mothers
were whoopin’ it up in the taverns), and religion helps many people
achieve this happiness. Religion comforts us when we think about
death; it’s a soothing remedy for fear.Yet do we want to be
deluded? Forever?
Obviously, we will never have the answer. We will only have our
answer.
And if, perchance, Granny comes back from wherever she has gone,
and tells me her answer, I’ll be sure to share it with all of
you.