All fear is rooted in the fear of death. There is a time or phase in every life when you are really terrified of dying. We live in time, and time is notoriously contingent. No one can say with certainty what is going to happen to us tonight, tomorrow, or next week. Time can bring anything to the door of your life. One of the terrifying aspects of life is this unpredictability. Anything can happen to you. Now as you are reading this, there are people all over the world who are being savagely visited by the unexpected. Things are, now, happening to them that will utterly disturb their lives forever. Their nest of belonging is broken, their lives will never be the same again. Someone in a doctor’s office is receiving bad news; someone in a road accident will never walk again; someone’s lover is leaving, never to return. When we look into the future of our lives, we cannot predict what will happen. We can be sure of nothing. Yet there is one fact that is certain, namely, that a time will come, a morning, an evening, or a night, when you will be called to make the journey out of this world, when you will have to die. Though that fact is certain, the nature of the fact remains completely contingent. In other words, you do not know where you will die, how you will die, when you will die, or who will be there or how you will feel. These facts about the nature of your death, the most decisive event in your life, remain completely opaque.
Though death is the most powerful and ultimate experience in one’s life, our culture goes to great pains to deny its presence. In a certain sense, the whole world of media, image, and advertising is trying to cultivate a cult of immortality; consequently, the rhythm of death in life is rarely acknowledged.
As Emmanuel Levinas so poignantly states it,
My death comes from an instant upon which I can in no way exercise my power. I do not run up against an obstacle which at last I touch in that collision, which, in surmounting or enduring it, I integrate into my life, suspending its otherness. Death is a menace that approaches me as mystery, its secrecy determines it, or it approaches without being able to be assumed, such that the time that separates me from my death dwindles and dwindles without end, involves a sort of last interval which my consciousness cannot traverse, and where a leap will somehow be produced from death to me. The last part of the route will be crossed without me; the time of death flows upstream….
DEATH IN THE CELTIC TRADITION
The Celtic tradition had a refined sense of the miracle of death. There are some beautiful prayers about death in Celtic spirituality. For the Celts, the eternal world was so close to the natural world that death was not seen as a terribly destructive or threatening event. When you enter the eternal world, you are going home to where no shadow, pain, or darkness can ever touch you again. There is a lovely Celtic prayer on this theme:
I am going home with thee, to thy home, to thy home,
I am going home with thee, to thy home of winter.
I am going home with thee, to thy home, to thy home,
I am going home with thee, to thy home of autumn of spring and of summer.
I am going home with thee, thy child of my love to thy eternal bed to thy perpetual sleep.
(TRANS. A. CARMICHAEL)
In that prayer the whole world of nature and the seasons is linked up beautifully with the presence of the eternal life.
You will never understand death or appreciate its loneliness until it visits. In Connemara the people say, “Ni thuigfidh tú an bás go dtiocfaidh sé ag do dhorás féin”—that is, “You will never understand death until it comes to your own door.” Another phrase they have is, “Is fear direach é an bás, ní chuire-ann sé scéal ar bith roimhe”—that is, “Death is a very direct individual who sends no story before him.” Another phrase is “Ní féidir dul i bhfolach ar an mbás”—that is, “There is no place to hide from death.” This means that when death is searching for you, it will always know where to find you.
WHEN DEATH VISITS…
Death is a lonely visitor. After it visits your home, nothing is ever the same again. There is an empty place at the table; there is an absence in the house. Having someone close to you die is an incredibly strange and desolate experience. Something breaks within you then that will never come together again. Gone is the person whom you loved, whose face and hands and body you knew so well. This body, for the first time, is completely empty. This is very frightening and strange. After the death many questions come into your mind concerning where the person has gone, what they see and feel now. The death of a loved one is bitterly lonely. When you really love someone, you would be willing to die in their place. Yet no one can take another’s place when that time comes. Each one of us has to go alone. It is so strange that when someone dies, they literally disappear. Human experience includes all kinds of continuity and discontinuity, closeness and distance. In death, experience reaches the ultimate frontier. The deceased literally falls out of the visible world of form and presence. At birth you appear out of nowhere, at death you disappear to nowhere. If you have a row with someone you love and she goes away, and if you then desperately need to meet again, regardless of the distance, you can travel to where she is to find her. The terrible moment of loneliness in grief comes when you realize that you will never see the deceased again. The absence of their life, the absence of their voice, face, and presence become something that, as Sylvia Plath says, begins to grow beside you like a tree.
THE CAOINEADH: THE IRISH MOURNING TRADITION
One of the lovely things about the Irish tradition is its great hospitality to death. When someone in the village dies, everyone goes to the funeral. First everyone comes to the house to sympathize. All the neighbors gather around to support the family and to help them. It is a lovely gift. When you are really desperate and lonely, you need neighbors to help you, support you, and bring you through that broken time. In Ireland there was a tradition known as the caoineadh. These were people, women mainly, who came in and keened the deceased. It was a kind of high-pitched wailing cry full of incredible loneliness. The narrative of the caoineadh was actually the history of the person’s life as these women had known him or her. A sad liturgy, beautifully woven of narrative, was gradually put into the place of the person’s new absence from the world. The caoineadh gathered all the key events of the person’s life. It was certainly heartbreakingly lonely, but it made a hospitable, ritual space for the mourning and sadness of the bereaved family. The caoineadh helped people to let the emotion of loneliness and grief flow in a natural way.
We have a tradition in Ireland known as the wake. This ensures that the person who has died is not left on their own the night after death. Neighbors, family members, and friends accompany the body through the early hours of its eternal change. Some drinks and tobacco are usually provided. Again, the conversation of the friends weaves a narrative of remembrance from the different elements of that person’s life.