The Valley of the Shadow of Death

I've had occasion to think about death lately. Not my own, but two of my best friends' mothers have died in the past month. Yesterday I attended the funeral of one of them and, like an anthropologist, I curiously noted some of the rituals in how we handle death.

For something that we all know is going to happen (man is the only animal that is said to be aware of its mortality, but I wonder about dolphins), human beings are pretty freaked out by death. One of the mothers' deaths was expected, the other was not, but in each case the experience is nonetheless shattering. It is so unnerving to people that you can't really talk to them normally--grief is the ultimate excuse for bizarre or intense behavior.

In reacting to the death of a loved one, there are number of factors at work in discombobulating us. When it's an unexpected death, there is the suddenness of it all. One of my friends' mother was 76 and not in the greatest of health, but she was not critically ill, and died of a massive brain bleed. I had breakfast with this friend just about ten days before, and we were discussing my other friend's mother's death, a woman who had dementia and died after a period of months. I mentioned that this second friend, who had moved her mother into her house and whose life essentially revolved around her, was going to experience a sense of liberation when the grief wore off.

So I mentioned to my first friend that when her mother went she would experience the same thing (she drove her to dialysis three times a week). "But your mother isn't on death's door," I mentioned. Little did I know.

All cultures have extensive rituals concerning death, more so than births, marriages, passages into adulthood, etc. I suppose the easy answer for that is that death is the ultimate mystery--as Shakespeare wrote, it's the "undiscovered country" and no one has come back to tell us about it. Because of this uncertainty, mankind has created an entire mythos surrounding it, with most cultures creating religions that comfort us on where the dead go. At the Methodist funeral I attended yesterday, there was talk of being with Jesus. This is only natural, for someone standing up in front of a room and telling the assembled that the person lying in the coffin in the front will simply be worm food.

At least that's what I believe. We are biological material, and there is no afterlife. For some people that's not easy to process. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen's character's doubts lead him to try suicide. Conversely, again referring to Hamlet, it kept the Prince of Denmark from offing himself, uncertain about his fate.

I spent some time on Wikipedia looking at the entry of "Personifications of Death." Almost all cultures have them, with the Western version usually called the "Grim Reaper," a gaunt figure (sometimes simply a skeleton) wearing a dark cloak and carrying a scythe and hourglass. In some cultures, the reaper can cause death, but in others he's a kindly angel, there to guide the deceased to the other side.

The accompany picture is of the angel of death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. He decides to bargain with his intended, a knight played by Max Von Sydow, by wagering the knight's soul in a game of chess. Allen parodied this in his one-act play, "Death Knocks," by having death and his victim play gin rummy.

At the funeral yesterday we heard the 23rd Psalm, which includes: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." Yes, we will die, we are told, but don't freak, because God will take care of you. Half of that, I believe, is true. We do walk through the valley of shadow of death, every day. But be comforted by the fact that it is the fate of all of us, every living creature on the planet.