Death and consolations

This post is sincerely meant, even if much of it is about things I don't believe, even though others do believe them. 

It is about the way we react to the knowledge that most of us take on board between maybe seven and twelve that all the people we love are going to die. It might be hard to accept that Spot or Frisky are going to die, but when you realise your Granny, Mammy, Daddy and all your siblings will too, it gets real. You may or may not add yourself to the list, but it matters little unless you are a very philosophical child.

So when you realise that everyone is going to die, you may need some help, some consolations. Some ideas that will help you fit your loved ones' deaths into a coherent and survivable world-view. This seems a natural thing to do, because the people you love are the most important thing in your life. You love them, or if not always and exactly love them, they are essential to your world. And you do not want to acknowledge too clearly that they can disappear from it in a moment. 

So what can you do to provide some consolation for this? 

1. Religion is probably the most obvious place to start, and the most widespread. And even if a priest or imam or leader (or even your Mam) would say that the key idea of Heaven is not that it is the place where you will still be able to see your Granny, you can see how a child or even an adult might take that bit as quite important. 

The words that people of religion use to describe where a dead loved one has 'gone' are quite important and reveal a lot. They have 'gone to their reward' (or more correctly if you rate judgement day, they are 'awaiting their reward'); 'passed over'; 'gone to meet their maker'; are now 'reunited' with their dead spouse or parents; 'they have come down the mountain together and sleep together at its foot'. The idea of being reunited with people as well as with your God is always quite prominent.

In fairness I should point out that there are religions and moral teachings that do not really have an idea of Heaven. As far as I understand, the idea of Heaven has no place in a religion like Buddhism where the idea of escaping the snares of this world is key. So the consolation there is of exiting this world completely, but I bow to correction on this.

2. Non-religious artistic consolations: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee” from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ('Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?'). This is another consolation that people are remembered by their good works, or deeds or sacrifice (think of those who die in wars). Leaving something behind you is seen as a way of having a stake in the world, but it seems to me that it doesn't really give much to the loved one who is left without the person being remembered. 

3. Consolations in your descendants: The idea that you have left a half-copy of yourself in your children if you have any must give some kind of consolation that Death is not such a permanent barrier because part of you lives on (even if with 50% less of your nose and much more Grunge in their playlist). But this may in fact be the best and most realistic consolation. When we look at all those hundred year old photos of great-grandma we know that something of them has come down to us, in a saying, a taste for mountains, a propensity for music. Whether it is genes or habits, we are in a long line that came to us and goes on. Pretty good consolation for the fact that our time here has to be finite for evolution to take place at all. 

4: Consolation in the fact of being one with the earth (and the Earth): This one is a bit spoddy, but it is tied to the 'ashes to ashes and dust to dust' of the Catholic rites; it just leave out the God part. If you have a reasonable understanding of how physical things (including ourselves) are rearranged and recreated on this Earth, and have been for billions of years, you will appreciate that we are both product and raw material. We die and if buried, the worms will eat us and go off and do useful things with us and over millions of millions and years, parts of us will redistribute around the world, and in the long long long term, the Universe, to be there to make new stars and planets, and here on this Earth, new people, or whatever lives here in the distant future. We are in a chemical and molecular sense indestructible. We may share genetic code with dinosaurs, but we also have molecules in us that may have literally been in a dinosaur 100 million years ago. There is a very nice song by Lady Maisery that plays on this idea:

"Order and Chaos", by Lady Maisery

5: My personal consolation: I'm sure I haven't invented this one, but I have mentioned it elsewhere and I will apply it to Cro, but you can all apply it to me if you like when I am gone. The way I am consoled is to think not just of all the joy and fun that Cro and I had, but to think of the things that we shared. The life, the love, the difficulties, the sudden surprises. Seeing them together makes something which is more than you are. The sharing creates an event, and my remembering it has Cro in it. Just as you reading this and knowing me has both you and me in it. And now that Cro is gone I have memories and life in me that have her in every part of them. And if you think of me and things we have done (or even thinking of reading this) then something of me is, by the sharing, still alive in you. 

That will do for me. Enjoy life and live it like you mean it!