Ay, but to die, and go we know not where...

Let's see where I am with all this. I've been trying to get at the link between our powerful sense of personal and unique identity, which I'm calling "ME-awareness," and our unwillingness to face the fact of our mortality. I've suggested a very crude typology of response to our mortality. A couple of people have pointed out very sensibly that most of us have a mix of these responses; I'd agree with that, and add that maybe our mix changes by the day, and according to the stage of life we're at.

And, by the way, I'm using "mortality" not as a euphemism for "death," but to avoid confusion with "dying," the process itself. So, mortality as a fact about human existence, about life itself.

I'm summing up because I'm aware that this isn't a daily chat sort of blog, and should anyone add themselves to the swelling throng of my reader, it might be puzzling to be dropped into the middle of all this stuff!

In addition to the ones I've listed, here is another kind of respons: the kind of aloof stoicism, unemotional detachment, that Yeats sums up as "cast a cold eye on life, on death..." Someone who: isn't running scared; isn't trying to drown out the thought of mortality with the noise of one huge continuous party of a life; hasn't got a religious belief that involves a literal heaven and afterlife; who might or might not put service to the people and the planet to the fore but isn't trying to evade or blot out the thought of the Grim Reaper.

Such a person doesn't push out of mind the possibility of a slow and unpleasant decline via disease, isn't torn by the thought of leaving loved people behind, is someone who endures pain and unpleasantness and isn't impressed by sensual pleasure or intellectual delight. A cold fish, you might think. Such a person can contemplate his/her own death with equanimity.

I've yet to meet such a person.

I'm not sure they exist.

Because I think most of us are scared by, fight against the thought of, the Grim Reaper, at least. some of the time. That may be fear about the manner of dying, an objection to the Reaper's appalling bad manners and impatience ("The Ruffian on the Stair".) It might be a dread of personal exinction, the ending of ME.

Writers from antiquity onwards have offered consolations in the face of our mortality. But in Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure" there is a powerful passage that really shook me when I first read it. Some of the language may seem a bit remote or strange nowadays if you're unfamiliar with it, but just give it a shot. Maybe try it out loud.

A young man has just been told to resign himself to his death:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world, or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling —'tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.


Well, you can trust the Bard to get inside your head.

Shakespeare moves from the horror of imagining yourself - your body - in the cold ground, to finding no consolation at all in the idea of your soul surviving death. So Christian faith isn't helping a lot here. And I think, no doubt presumptuously, that he is not only responding to the fear that even a Christian can't be sure where his soul will land up, but also instinctively to the dread of the end of a human consciousness.The first part ends in a sort of howl - "'tis too horrible!" Any life, however dreadful, is better than no-ME.

Let's try to tighten all this up a bit (not before time, you may think.)

People deal with the fact of our mortality in all sorts of ways, and similarly they face their actual deaths in all sorts of ways, if indeed they have any time in which to do so. Something that makes it harder to do so is our instinctive dread of the end of identity, of my precious unique individual self - exit ego: the thought of no more conscious awareness, no more ME. This dread seems to me profound and irrational - after all, we all know it's going to happen, so what's the point in fearing it? "Ay, but to die, and go we know not where..."

I'm interested in ways we can lessen this dread. And that's because it may be that we can come to terms with our mortality during our lives, and face our actual deaths when they come more calmly, if we can lessen our dread of ME-extinction.It may be that we can lead richer lives, relate better to those around us, and even - have better funerals!

Next time, I'll move onto ways people have of dealing with the dread of extinction, and eventually I'll write about a way that I have come across, (and so have plenty of others) which I think can help a lot. But no missionary spiel, no snake-oil, no sales pitch, I promise.

Onwards to mortality

I've found discussions around The Good Funeral Guide, this blog, Don't Get Too Close to the Furnace, thoughts from Rupert and Claire, Jonathan and others - all very helpful. No, that's an understatement. I've been able to refine and develop my practice as a humanist minister by thinking through, sometimes feeling through, our discussions. I think I'm at a sort of plateau now. I'm sure I'll work on and find the need once again to re-define what I do in funerals, and how it relates to my life, but for now, I feel better balanced and calmer about it all. So it's a welcome plateau. This has, I think, helped me to take part in, be part of, better funerals than when I started out a couple of years ago. I know they're better, I can see and feel it, and they tell me so. Good. Thank you all, and thanks to others who've commented, and who have read but not commented. But no, please don't go, this isn't goodbye.

Here's a position. The things that many of us feel are not good about contemporary funerals: hurried, absent-minded crem ceremonies, horrible crems, the avoidance of death and the dead, the euphemism virus ("Only sleeping?" said Spike Milligan. "Who does he think he's kidding?"), a few callous or careless individuals, the feeling that the bereaved are sometimes skating over or moving round their grief rather than going through it, for which they may suffer later, etc etc. You'll have your own list. All this needs to improve. Jonathan said recently on GFG "It’s time to turn on the lights, that’s all. Hand the funeral back to its owners, the family and the community." Yes, we need big changes. De-professionalisation may be the ultimate goal. But.

I've droned on before that we have to take other people's realities and views as every bit as valid as ours, and work with those. We may be able to extend what they think they are capable of, and what they think a funeral is actually for. We shouldn't even try to effect a revolution in funeral practice in their own front rooms! I'm not a romantic revolutionary (at least, not any more)and I think there's a lot of hard and gradual work to do, because it involves changing cultural attitudes to our mortality and our eventual deaths. So I'm a boring social democrat in the death revolution, not a Trot.

Seems to me changes will come from the work of well-integrated providers that move through from first contact with the bereaved and the body to the end of a fulfilling funeral, providers that have the sensitivity to know how far to go and what these people, here and now, might be capable of. They will transmit a new virus - "look, you can do it, I'll just help where you need me, if at all." But that will also be part of a huge change in our culture, and it has of course started, or I wouldn't be writing this and you hordes out there (!) wouldn't be reading it.

I'm going to spend a little more time now, in this blog, with its actual title, "Mindfulness and Mortality," and probably a bit less on the funeral process itself. But please don't go, I think it does and will relate to the debate about funerals - and politics, and medicine, and inheritance law, and military service, and the hedonic cycle that is ruining our planet, and - so on. Thanks for reading so far. Sorry it's not as visually lively and amusing as so many blogs - I'm just working through ideas that seem important to me and I hope to you, rathher than writing a chirpy little e-diary, or selling something - and maybe I'll try not to write such big slabs of stuff in future! Anyway, see you (I hope) soon, right here. Bloody great, the internet, isn't it?