Pasts, Presents and Futures

About Pasts:
I've been doing a lot of funerals lately, or at least, so it seems to me. Two last weekend. Another tomorrow. I've been given several occasions to think about them, and what we are aiming to accomplish in them.

What is it about funerals that bring out the “gotta clean up this mess” in us? What happened to the Brutus in us who would simply bury Caesar without feeling compelled to praise? Or more, why are we so ashamed about another’s life, the choices they made, and what we may regard as their failings, that we tell ourselves what we can mention, and what we can’t?

This thought occurs to me often. My approach is to speak with the family beforehand about what they want to have said about their loved one. Nearly always we come to “awkward” moments when something has happened in the person’s life about which the family has lots of feelings. Maybe it was a divorce or an infidelity or a transgression of some sort, or perhaps an alcohol- or drug-related history, or even a job loss and a period of unemployment. Whatever it might be, such events or proclivities nearly always have a life-shaping effect on both the one whose life we are now recalling, and on the family members now recalling it! Yet more often than not, the consensus among those entrusted with telling the story of their loved one's life is: we can't mention that; we shouldn't talk about that. Talk about the "good" things, I'm told, but there seems little sense that what makes our lives rich and human and real are not just the flights from peak to peak to peak, but the ups and downs, the "thrill of victory and the agony of defeat," the ways we triumphed over failings, or did not. How can there be any real "good," in other words, without some "bad," some tragedy, some pain.

History belongs less to the victors than to those who live to tell its stories, and so, we who will die would do well to take note of who will be around to tell the stories of our lives! In their hands, our life may well have turned out to mean something very different than it did to us.

One dimension of how this comes to be arises in the search for meaning in the life of the deceased. At funerals we tend not to be satisfied simply with chronology, with recounting events. In fact, those who would remember us quite often know only a very little about what has actually happened in our lives! It is surprising what is remembered and what is forgotten when others look back over our lives at the end. But that makes the significance of what IS remembered all the more, well, significant. For there is at some point in every funeral a pronouncement or two about what the meaning of this particular life was. It is important for us to have something to say at that point!

Yet, too often, there is in fact not much to say. Sometimes it is because the person died so young. I remember talking with this man about his experience of going to a friend's son's funeral. I think the young man was 18 or 19 when he died, as I recall, one of the casualties of our conflict in Iraq. Yes, the usual military things were said, about how he'd died "defending" his country and what not. But, as my aquaintance, remarked to me, "he was too young to have accomplished anything, so all they really could say was that he was a nice guy, who was well-liked in school." Not all of us ARE well-liked in high school and some of us die without the benefit of military service to give our having lived some semblance of meaning.
In fact, as the poet said, many of us really do lead lives of "quiet desperation." And from my hospice work I can tell you that many more of us die without the benefit of much family or many friends to mourn us. And even when we do have family and/or friends who are willing to speak of us, too often they speak banalities, like "he was a good man," and sadly shake their heads.

My point is less that many of our lives are meaningless than that even those who love us best have difficulty appreciating how meaningful they were or might have been.

And I'm also trying to encourage us to lean into our days with a sense that they might actually add up to something significant. I'm encouraging us to live into Life with an intention of making our lives meaningful. I think we better the chances that someone will see our lives' significance that way.

I remember a comic from the newspaper, "Ballard Street" or something like that, showing folks leaving a funeral, and one turns to the other and says something to effect that he'd better start leading a more significant life NOW! That's what I mean...

About Presents:
I had occasion this week to meet a gentleman in his 90's whose response to being on hospice was apparently rare enough that we were puzzled by it at first. He presented initially as "depressed," which is always a convenient medical condition, and not an infrequently assigned state for a hospice patient. Afterall, didn't Elisabeth Kubler-Ross tell us that dying entailed being depressed? And don't we have pills for that? Yes, if you are dying and deemed depressed, we can give you anti-depressants to elevate your mood so you won't feel so bad about it!

But actually, this man was less depressed than something else. I think he is actually in something of a state of shock-- that this is really happening to him, and that yes, the Death he'd always heard about and had even seen quite enough of in his 90+ years was actually coming to him. He put it well when he told me, "I'd never thought about it."

I believe him. I believe he never thought that Death would happen to him, at least not in any real way. He was alert and aware and as reasonably sane as the rest of us, so he knew in some part of himself that he was going to die. But he'd avoided ever thinking about it in real terms. Oh, he'd made his "arrangements," for gravesite and will and trust and the like. But as an existential possibility, he'd never thought of, well, not existing.

Sooner or later, we all have to, you know. We have to "not exist." And we probaly have to think about "not existing." Lots of folks HAVE thought about non-existence over the span of human experience, and so we have after-life beliefs and musings, and it has been said that the whole purpose of the world's religions and of religious belief in general is to have us think about not existing and to be able to answer comfortingly the questions that arise in our minds about that. Certainly a good deal not only of religion but also of philosophy is dedicated to the subject. So lots of folks over Time have thought about it. Just not this genteman...

He's thinking about it now, of course, and it is keeping him up nights-- not just the existential anxiety of not existing but also the sheer confusion of sorting through what to believe, that is, coming to some sense of HOW to think about it. And he's got nothing else to do with his days BUT think about it...

In a way, this relates to the previous subject, because he might (we'll see) find it easier to think about not existing if he can reach some sense about what the significance of his having existed has been. He might feel better about not "going on" if he can arrive at a sense in himself that what has gone on in the course of his days was worth something to someone. I believe, anyway, that we face the end of our days with a more peaceful heart if we can say that the sum of our days added up to something.

But we have to think about it-- both our life and its meaning and its ending-- if we are to come to that peace. Such may or may not turn out to be a peace "that passes all understanding," but I'll guarantee you it will be a peace that no anti-depressant will be able to give you!

About Futures:
I've been speaking to how looking back can help us face up to our finitude, but really our past is what we make it, in terms of what we remember and what we forget; and our present is what we declare it to be, in terms of what it all adds up to, what it is "all about, Alfie." But it is in facing our futures that we truly come to terms with existentially facing Death, because our future is unknown and to a great degree unknowable-- just as our experience of death is both of the unknown and to a great degree unknowable.

We do not live in a society that deals well with the unknown. We hedge against it by becoming our own "futurologists," striving to predict, as if we knew, what might be, as if it were to come to pass, thus comforting ourselves with what we think we know, even though, we are fain to admit to ourselves, no one really can know. The anxiety of not knowing is so painful that we use our imaginations in the worst way, to fabricate comforting scenarios for ourselves. Thankfully, living with these illusions does have its calming effect-- at least until we discover that what we imagined was to be is not anywhere close to what actually is, once we get there.

I'm suggesting that we have an alternative, and that alternative entails not being anxious about what we do not and cannot know, but rather developing in ourselves an acceptance of the our limitations-- and letting it all be as it is. For my money, the world's religions are really at their best not when they teach us about the life (or lives) after this life, but when they teach us how to be non-anxious and live within this one. I mean, the living of these days is no mean trick for any of us! I believe that we do better at that when we have the spiritual resources within us to face the hour, instead of borrowing comfort from whatever we have come to believe happens to us after we die.

To that end, in my own life, for my self, I have developed a benediction-- or a maxim or a mantra, if you will. What I tell myself is, "it is all good." It is all good, when things are pleasant. It is all good, when things are painful. But it is all good.

I say it about my past: All the things that happened to me, all the decisions that I made, all the comedies and the tragedies, the loves won and lost, the periods of clarity and those of confusion, the opportunities for service and those stretches of being unemployed, all of it: all good.

I say it about my present: The loneliness or the solitariness or the company, the times I feel useless or helpless or competent or engaged, the ways I waste time or make the most of it, the met and the unmet wishes, dreams and desires as well as the fears and reassurances of going from moment to moment in this day, the conversations and the silences, all of it: all good.

And I say it about my future: My looking down the road and wondering where I'll be or who I'll be with or what I'll be doing, the anticipations of my aging and how "the old grey mare ain't what she used to be" or even the old grey stallion for that matter, the ways I feel myself tempted to control the uncontrollable or even influence what might be controllable or not, etc., all of it: all good.

And then I aim to let that benediction settle in me and settle me and calm me...

For truly, it really IS, "all good." Blessings...