Death and the Morning Walk
On our cherished, brisk, hour and fifteen-minute morning walks, Ray and I explore any and all thoughts and feelings we have had in the previous 24 hours that we want to share with the other. It may be just the observation that the pelican gliding at the moment over the ocean is extraordinarily majestic or it might be an extended discussion on how we feel about our own and each other’s eventual death.
Yesterday our conversation was heavily influenced by the report in the New York Times about the 21-year-old Briton who fell hundreds of feet to his death while scaling with his also ill-fated friend the notoriously dangerous icy ascent of the 14,000 foot Tacul peak in the French Alps. Two years earlier, Rob Gauntlett became the youngest Briton to reach the top of Mt. Everest. At age 19, he and a traveling companion had traversed by skis, dogsleds, bicycles and sailboat 26,000 miles from the North Pole to the South Pole.
“What a sad waste of life,” I said.
“But what a way to go,” countered Ray. “He died happy, doing what he loved to do.”
He may have been happy with his life, and just before he fell, but I doubt he died happily. I imagine that he was horrified during his long fall, feeling dread that he was dying many years before he imagined he would. He had lived a happy and active 21 years doing what he loved to do, something most people his age probably couldn’t claim to have done, but did he greet death with joy?
And yet, as Ray argued, there are many young men and women today as young as Rob Gauntlett who greet death with joy as they blow themselves up because they feel they are entering a much happier life in heaven. They didn’t climb Mt Everest in this life but they imagine far greater joy and exultation in the next.
For Christmas, I gave Ray a copy of the book This Republic of Suffering - Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust. During our walk yesterday morning, Ray cited Faust in saying that most of the thousands of young men who died on both sides of the horrible national fratricide did so feeling good about their noble sacrifice and trusting that they were heading to their eternal reward. Like the young suicide bombers of today, the inexperienced, conservative religious American youth of the mid-1800s didn’t cling to this life because they anticipated a great reward in the next.
Did they die happily doing what they most enjoyed? I doubt it. I think that most of them would love to have lived longer and maybe one day have experienced some of the thrill of Rob Gauntlett’s life. Even Jesus, at 33, who died doing what he felt called to do, and who had expectations of a better life after this one, prayed that he might be spared the experience of his death on the cross, but “Thy will be done.”
So, here we are today at 5:30 a.m. in the Cleveland Clinic in Weston, Florida, having missed our cherished morning walk, and I’m sitting next to Ray who is lying in bed in a hospital gown and blue hair bonnet, looking a bit pale and helpless as he waits for a biopsy on his leg muscle to determine why he is experiencing weakness, and I’m thinking about the day one of us will be watching the other die.
He’s not dying. Though suffering back, neck, and shoulder pain from disc problems, arthritis, and a reaction to statin drugs, he’s otherwise healthy and happy. I nevertheless make funny comments to him and to all attending doctors and nurses to make him and them laugh so that the situation has no feeling of seriousness. I’m not ready for letting go now, no matter how long we’ve lived and no matter how many emotional, psychological, and spiritual Mt. Everests we have climbed together. Not yet, if I have a choice.
Could we both die happy? Yes, we both feel we have lived full, happy lives. Though neither of us imagines an afterlife of eternal reward and bliss, we aren’t afraid of or resentful of death. We’ve had more than our fair share of the banquet of life. But I can’t say that either of us would die happily and I know that neither of us would happily let go of the other, at least, not as this time.
Perhaps, though, I should check in with him again. If Ray is able to go for our walk tomorrow morning, we’ll have to talk about that.
