“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
Ms. Joan Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking as her way of confronting her loss and grief after the death of her husband, John Dunne, from a fatal heart attack on December 30, 2003. I’m puzzled by her use of the adjective “magical” so I consulted my Canadian Oxford Dictionary for a precise definition. The first definition says “of or relating to magic”, which involves some kind of trickery. Well, I don’t think that was what in her mind at all. The third definition, however, says “an inexplicable or remarkable influence producing surprising results.” Perhaps this was what she meant which prompted her to write these four lines at the beginning of her book, and led me as well to reflect my own mortality:
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
Ever since I turned 50 I have a morbid habit of looking up the obituary pages of the Toronto Star. I note their age and cause of death, trying to find a comfortable assurance that their deaths are bearable and natural, such as due to old age. But when their deaths are premature caused by cancer, tumour and accidents, for example, I nurture the notion that my mortality could happen sooner than I wanted. And by accepting the fragility of life and the inevitability of death, probably I’ll be more accepting of my own.
I always worry that I might come down with a major illness, and would be quite a burden to my wife and daughter. I hope when that happens there would be an easy way out for me. Before dying from a brain tumour, Dr. Donald Low, who became well-known during the SARS crisis in Toronto, recorded a video of himself deteriorating from his illness and pleaded for a physician-assisted suicide. In that video, he made a powerful statement to those opposed of the reforms he was recommending: “I wish they could live in my body for 24 hours.” Susan Sontag chimed in in her Illness as Metaphor (1978), “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
Why do we fear death, this “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns, — puzzles the will,/And makes us rather bear those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of?/ Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” to quote Shakespeare in one of his plays, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark?
Indeed, the uncertainty of the life-after is the question. Do we retain our personality, or are we transformed to something better or worse? Not knowing who we will become, we stick around a bit longer until, perhaps, we find out finally the meaning of our lives, or life’s purpose, or the enduring legacy we can be remembered by. But according to Elif Shafak in her novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World (2019), we fear death because of “the simple realization that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us.”
Several years ago I saw a clip of a TV documentary series entitled “The Last Right”. The lady was recalling the last day when her husband passed away. She said there was nothing unusual on that day. They did their normal routine — she was planting tulips while her husband was reading a book in the sunroom with the cat on his lap. Ever since her husband was diagnosed with ALS (also known as the Lou Gehrig’s disease) all trivialities didn’t seem to matter and they lived for the “radiance of the ordinary” each day. The husband took his own life and died peacefully while surrounded with loved ones.
The argument of the TV documentary was that when the quality of life had deteriorated, an individual had the right to choose his/her own end. But our Catholic faith condemns suicide as an immoral and selfish act. So when our loved ones, friends and neighbors are in the throes of debilitating illnesses, we pray fervently for some kind of a miracle. But does God really intervene?
Our human world is beset with so much evil leading us to the question: why God allows bad things to happen to good people? A German philosopher named Gottfried W. Leibniz (1646 – 1716) explained the problem of evil through his notion of alternative possible worlds. He said that God had given us a free will which allowed wrongdoing and evil to exist. So this was our best possible world as far as free will was concerned. God could have given us a perfect world but then we wouldn’t have a free will.
Of course the notion of best possible world would not stay unchallenged. A leading French philosopher and writer of the Enlightenment named Voltaire (1694 – 1778) lampooned the idea in his famous novel Candide (1759) by allowing the character Pangloss to repeat the phrase “the best of possible worlds” whenever misfortunes befell on him and Candide.
Oftentimes we hear people say: “Our ways are not God’s; It happens for a reason that only God knows; God knows our suffering, so if we don’t get relief here on earth, then He will take care of us in the hereafter; perhaps you’ve done something against God’s command.” But in spite of these well-intended justifications of God’s purpose (theodicy), we still don’t feel adequately comforted.
So the problem of evil persists even beyond our time, especially if we invoke God’s active involvement in our affairs. In my case, I struggle to believe in the interpretation of the Christian God whenever I learn the death of innocent children. It just doesn’t make sense to me why God can’t just prevent it from happening, nor does it make it justifiably so if God were to do it selectively. As a parent I’ll do anything within my power to protect my child from harm. This is quite natural. Even the animals have that natural feeling as well. Why not God?
On January 26, 2020, the world was shocked to learn the tragic death of nine people, including Kobe Bryant (41) and his eldest daughter Gianna (13). As we all know, death comes anytime of the day. It favours no one: whether you are a celebrity or just an ordinary person; young or old; rich or poor, healthy or in poor health. In the words of Dag Hammarskjöld, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations: “Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.” If this advice is not enough, let me quote you another one from our own. Before he was to be executed on December 29, 1896, Jose Rizal wrote his final thoughts in a poem entitled Ultimo Adios (Last Farewell). If words do matter for comfort and acceptance, let’s heed Rizal when he said “Morir es descansar! (To die is to rest!).”
Rey Moreno
Pickering, Ontario
February 20, 2020