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Sep. 21st, 2013
Death: A Dialogue.
Sep. 21st, 2013 06:57 pmI once had to act as an observer on an assessment panel for a life assurance business, watching salesmen interacting with actors improvising the role of customers. One of the sessions went something like this:
Salesman: what if you died without making arrangements for your family? How would you feel then?
Customer: well, I'd be dead, wouldn't I? I wouldn't feel anything!
The salesman didn't pass. And the "customer" was absolutely right.
We all took the question literally; no time machines or faster than light travel. Almost everyone, I think, said their immediate family; no one said Nelson Mandela or Richard Branson.
The discussion quickly broadened to how we would fill our last hours. No one wanted to go to the gym. Most people wanted to spend their remaining time with like minded people. I don't think I specified, but the idea of spending some time in the Royal Botanic Garden would be good. Or on top of a mountain - Liatach or An Teallach, I think. Or maybe the Cuillin Ridge on Skye.
The thing is, why wait until we are close to death to do whatever it is off would want to do? If you can articulate what it is you would do, surely the best time to do it is now? Everyday life gets in the way. It is months since I walked in the Botanics, despite it being only five minutes away!
It was a very powerful question, and it gave rise to some quite moving conversations. I doubt I was the only person there to think of the dead - friends and family. We talked about the first dead people we saw. (I see dead people!) The first dead body I saw was that of a drowned man, pulled by the police from the River Orwell; I was fourteen, I think.
My grandmother had died a year or so before, but I guiltily remembered crying more for my cat who died shortly afterwards than my grandmother (though I did cry for her, too).
We also talked about ritual and the spiritual. Some people said they would want to spend time in church. I don't find the spiritual in religion (I am an atheist, after all!); for me, it is about music. I appreciate churches, but not believing in God or gods, their primary function baffles me. But the sound of Coltrane playing... "Spiritual". Well, it is. Saxophones move me; Bruckner and Mahler, too. The sound of big music. We talked about how most people no longer sing communally in church; but watch the footage of a festival like Glastonbury or TinthePark, and the whole audience is singing along: they know all the words, to all the artists. It is a gathering, a communal event. Sports events too can have that same communal feeling.
So we talked about a lot of stuff. Interesting, given the topic, that it wasn't the slightest but morose. It was very thoughtful - we all had our ghosts there (living or not) - but it was much more about valuing what we have now rather than what (and those) we have lost.
Death is a modern taboo: we don't really talk about it; in the last couple of generations - maybe since the mid-twentieth century - as medicine and technology have stopped some many people dying of disease and accident, and people regularly live into their 80s, death has been sanitised and removed from sight. (Though didn't Jessica Mitford say something very similar in the 1960s?) We can be uncomfortable when someone dies: we don't know what to say to the living. So there was a lot in the dialogue - it was making us confront from very fundamental feelings.
It was a very interesting evening. Not necessarily easy, though - but hard in a good way. The substance that comes out of dialogue is tangible.
Salesman: what if you died without making arrangements for your family? How would you feel then?
Customer: well, I'd be dead, wouldn't I? I wouldn't feel anything!
The salesman didn't pass. And the "customer" was absolutely right.
* * *
The dialogue group a couple of weeks ago was all about death. The jumping off point for the conversation between the six of us sitting in a circle was "if you knew all of humanity would would be wiped out tomorrow, who would you choose to see?" It was a very stimulating question, which has come back to me a few times; I'm still thinking about it! (And this is of course a work-in-progress...!)We all took the question literally; no time machines or faster than light travel. Almost everyone, I think, said their immediate family; no one said Nelson Mandela or Richard Branson.
The discussion quickly broadened to how we would fill our last hours. No one wanted to go to the gym. Most people wanted to spend their remaining time with like minded people. I don't think I specified, but the idea of spending some time in the Royal Botanic Garden would be good. Or on top of a mountain - Liatach or An Teallach, I think. Or maybe the Cuillin Ridge on Skye.
The thing is, why wait until we are close to death to do whatever it is off would want to do? If you can articulate what it is you would do, surely the best time to do it is now? Everyday life gets in the way. It is months since I walked in the Botanics, despite it being only five minutes away!
It was a very powerful question, and it gave rise to some quite moving conversations. I doubt I was the only person there to think of the dead - friends and family. We talked about the first dead people we saw. (I see dead people!) The first dead body I saw was that of a drowned man, pulled by the police from the River Orwell; I was fourteen, I think.
My grandmother had died a year or so before, but I guiltily remembered crying more for my cat who died shortly afterwards than my grandmother (though I did cry for her, too).
We also talked about ritual and the spiritual. Some people said they would want to spend time in church. I don't find the spiritual in religion (I am an atheist, after all!); for me, it is about music. I appreciate churches, but not believing in God or gods, their primary function baffles me. But the sound of Coltrane playing... "Spiritual". Well, it is. Saxophones move me; Bruckner and Mahler, too. The sound of big music. We talked about how most people no longer sing communally in church; but watch the footage of a festival like Glastonbury or TinthePark, and the whole audience is singing along: they know all the words, to all the artists. It is a gathering, a communal event. Sports events too can have that same communal feeling.
So we talked about a lot of stuff. Interesting, given the topic, that it wasn't the slightest but morose. It was very thoughtful - we all had our ghosts there (living or not) - but it was much more about valuing what we have now rather than what (and those) we have lost.
Death is a modern taboo: we don't really talk about it; in the last couple of generations - maybe since the mid-twentieth century - as medicine and technology have stopped some many people dying of disease and accident, and people regularly live into their 80s, death has been sanitised and removed from sight. (Though didn't Jessica Mitford say something very similar in the 1960s?) We can be uncomfortable when someone dies: we don't know what to say to the living. So there was a lot in the dialogue - it was making us confront from very fundamental feelings.
It was a very interesting evening. Not necessarily easy, though - but hard in a good way. The substance that comes out of dialogue is tangible.