Death is not the end, and nor is Boris Johnson
Sunday Star Times Sep 8 2019
We used to say “passed” to describe a quiet, perhaps expected, death. Passed away in his sleep. Passed away after a long illness. Passed, now at rest.
Now, it's used to describe a death in almost any manner. Passed away in a car crash, passed away in an explosion, passed away in a drug deal that went bad.
This is euphemism at work. We do our best to deny it, to ignore it, to will it away. We will not say its name. We tiptoe around death the way Victorians did around sex.
I have spent years and years with my gaze averted, my back turned to it. Until now. I'm grateful to the Going West writers festival for dropping me into a panel discussion that has confronted me. Embrace death, you chicken.
It turns out I’m open to revelation. ‘Death and Dying in NZ’, a new collection of essays, has left me with the sense that it's possible to live a more content - or at least less fearful - life if we know and understand death more intimately.
For most of humanity, death has been visible and near. You would be there for all of it.
Your loved one died, you prepared them for burial, you were there for each step. But things changed for us in the last century. People are living much longer, far fewer children die, professionals are there to take care of everything that follows the last breath. What was once familiar to us might now be perturbing, if we were to stay on for the whole procedure. The steps involved in cremation, for instance, are not the delicate thing the soft music and curtains might suggest.
Our experience of death and its rituals has become muted, sanitised, brought about doubtless through kind hearted good intentions but is it in our best interest to be disconnected? Could it not just leave us more fearful and bereft?
There’s muted blandness in the architecture of crematoria, architect Guy Marriage writes, comparing, say, the welcoming warmth of Old St Paul's Wellington with the modern non-denominational - places we gather that have been designed to be functional, pragmatic, inoffensive. The effect is to mute or numb the emotions.
We can deny ourselves by being composed and reserved and stilted. In an essay about loss and grief Vana Manasiadis describes the way we will praise people for “holding it together” in a eulogy. She talks about the reward and release of diving into grief, in the way it can be so readily done in her Greek culture.
I had my back turned for so long because that’s what a heart attack in your twenties can do. At the swimming pool, a few weeks after I’d left hospital, a coronary care nurse was swimming slowly, readying herself for the arrival of her baby. She asked how I was doing.
I described an energetic regime of health and fitness. She told me I should maybe be preparing myself for things coming to an end. I understand now what she was saying, but all I had that morning was alarm and horror. I didn't want to die. And I didn’t want to entertain any idea of dying.
These days I’m more willing to turn my face to it. Maybe that's just because I’ve had another thirty years, but I’ve also come to find comfort in understanding that we’re all part of something much, much larger.
The universe is really just a vast swirling lava lamp of atoms. We die, the atoms move on, they reassemble. In fact they are swirling endlessly, even as we live, all of us composed of atoms that inhabited other bodies. In each of us, a little of Mother Teresa. Also a bit of Hitler. Also Einstein. Also Princess Diana. Also Eichmann.
This also means we have some of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. This could maybe help whenever you're trying to understand why you have done something unbelievably stupid.
Those populists. Boy are we ever trying to work out what's going on inside their heads. Do they want to tear everything down? Are they scared of change in any shape? Or is it simply that they think they’re better than people from somewhere else?
I’m just hoping their atoms turn into something more useful once they’ve passed away.