Talking about death tends to weird people out.
I learned that when I worked (and even lived) at a mortuary during my college years. People were endlessly fascinated and asked odd questions, then they'd cringe like they weren't ready to hear the answers. Death is not something people talk about.
Which is too bad. Without death, I'm not sure we'd take life very seriously. I mean, if I could spend the next two years binge-watching everything that looked interesting on Netflix while sitting on my couch eating donuts and pizza, why not? I wouldn't have "wasted time" because I would still have an infinite supply of time ahead. But people die. So our time on this Earth is limited, even if we don't like to face it.
Novelist Jodi Picoult took on our odd aversion to thinking about death in her The Book of Two Ways (and if you can’t trust a novelist to write inspiring lines on death, who can you trust?). She wrote, “Everyone’s surprised by death, which is kind of ridiculous, when you think about it. It’s not exactly a spoiler” (p. 99). So true. What’s that old line about life (attributed to just about everybody)? “Life: No one gets out alive…” But what Picoult goes on to say next is what really caught my eye. She says, “But I think what really shocked me is how many people can’t see the shape of the life they’ve lived until they get to the very end of it” (p. 99).
Score one for the novelist.
To add to her scorecard, let me give you a couple of other quotes that struck me:
“The thing about death is that we’re all terrified of it happening, and we’re devastated when it does, and we go out of our way to pretend neither of these things is true” (p. 146).
“Why are people so afraid of dying? Well, that’s easy. Because it’s hard for us to conceive of a world without us in it” (p. 191).
“Well, you have to be near death to understand why life matters… Otherwise, you don’t have the perspective. You believe you have the time to put off that phone call you haven’t made to your mother. You let an old argument fester. You fold down the page in a travel magazine and tell yourself one day, you’ll get to Istanbul or Santorini or back to the town where you were born. You have the luxury of time, until you don’t—then it becomes clear what’s most important” (p. 232).
Happy and festive quotes, for sure! I’ll bet she’s fun to sit next to at a party! …But you’ve got to give her credit for honesty.
I lost someone close to me when I was young, someone I assumed would still be around now that I’m not so young. I lost someone else a couple of decades later I said, again and again, I’d go visit, yet I never got there. I’ve wasted time binge-watching shows I no longer remember or care about. I’ve let arguments fester and folded down pages in travel magazines and wouldn’t have done nearly the number of interesting things in my life if my wife didn’t drag me into doing them.
Finding meaning in our lives may be easier when we’re at the end of them, when it all flashes before our eyes and we can reflect. If we're lucky and get some time, in our final moments I suspect it will be easier to see the shape of how we’ve lived and to understand why life matters.
But it's "the meantime" that’s the problem. How do I work on seeing the shape of my life now? How do I find the vision that pulls me off the couch to work on something I love doing or to spend time with people I care about? How do I talk myself into really living my life before I’m living its final moments?
One answer might be finding that person, that idea, that example that reminds you, again and again, to be present and really here in this passing moment. For me, that’s been Martin Buber’s theory of Dialogue (which I’ve ranted and raved about here). What is it for you? Who or what makes you say, “I’m going to turn this dull show off and do something I care about”? What reminds you that work is just one part of your life, not all of it?
Find that thing (maybe it’s a Jodi Picoult novel or a religious text or an inspiring family member—or all of the above), and think about it often. And in that way, we can work now to craft a life we’ll love the shape of when we’re looking back at it during the inevitable moment in the future when the D-Word comes calling on us all.