The Drift Called the Infinite: Emily Dickinson on Making Sense of Loss

Reflections on silence and eternity from the poet laureate of death.

“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created,” poet Meghan O’Rourke wrote in her stirring memoir of losing her mother. More than a century earlier, another poet with a rare gift for philosophical prose reflected on mortality in the wake of her own mother’s death.

Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) was about to turn fifty-two when her mother, after whom she was named, died. A stroke had left her paralyzed and almost entirely disabled eight years earlier. Despite her lifelong infirm health, her disinterest in the life of the mind, and the surges of unhappiness in the Dickinson home, Emily Norcross Dickinson had been attentive and affectionate to her daughter, igniting the poet’s little-known but ardent passion for botany and prompting her to write that “home is a holy thing.”

Although a contemplation of mortality haunts nearly all of Dickinson’s 1775 surviving poems in varying degrees of directness, her mother’s death forced a confrontation with mortality of a wholly different order — loss as an acute immediacy rather than a symbolic and speculative abstraction.

In a letter to her cousins penned shortly after her mother’s death in November of 1882 and found in The Letters of Emily Dickinson (public library), the poet writes:

Mother’s dying almost stunned my spirit… She slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called “the infinite.”

We don’t know where she is, though so many tell us.

Emily Dickinson, daguerreotype, circa 1847.

Even as a child, Emily had come to doubt the immortality so resolutely promised by the Calvinist dogma of her elders. “Sermons on unbelief ever did attract me,” she wrote in her twenties to Susan Gilbert — her first great love and lifelong closest friend. Dickinson went on to reject the prescriptive traditional religion of her era, never joined a church, and adopted a view of spirituality kindred to astronomer Maria Mitchell’s. It is with this mindset that she adds in the letter to her cousins:

I believe we shall in some manner be cherished by our Maker — that the One who gave us this remarkable earth has the power still farther to surprise that which He has caused. Beyond that all is silence…

Writing less than four years before her own untimely death, she ends the letter with these words:

I cannot tell how Eternity seems. It sweeps around me like a sea… Thank you for remembering me. Remembrance — mighty word.

In another letter from the following spring, penned after receiving news of a friend’s death, Dickinson stills her swirling sorrow the best way she knew how — in a poem:

Each that we lose takes part of us;
A crescent still abides,
Which like the moon, some turbid night,
Is summoned by the tides.

She adds a sobering reflection on the shock each of us experiences the first time we lose a loved one:

Till the first friend dies, we think ecstasy impersonal, but then discover that he was the cup from which we drank it, itself as yet unknown.

Complement with a collection of moving consolation letters by great artists, writers, and scientists ranging from Lincoln to Einstein to Turing, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on how Darwin and Freud shaped our relationship to mortality, Seneca on the key to resilience in the face of loss, and this unusual Danish picture-book about death, then revisit Cynthia Nixon’s beautiful reading of Dickinson’s “While I was fearing it, it came” and Dickinson’s forgotten herbarium — an elegy for time and mortality at the intersection of poetry and science.

Complete Article HERE!

Can a dying patient be a healthy person?

By and

[T]he news was bad. Mimi, a woman in her early 80s, had been undergoing treatment for lymphoma. Her husband was being treated for bladder cancer. Recently, she developed chest pain, and a biopsy showed that she had developed a secondary tumor of the pleura, the space around one of her lungs. Her oncology team’s mission was to share this bad news.

Mimi’s case was far from unique. Each year in the U.S., over 1.6 million patients receive hospice care, a number that has been increasing rapidly over the past few years. What made Mimi’s case remarkable was not the grimness of her prognosis but her reaction to it.

When the members of the team walked into Mimi’s hospital room, she was lying in bed holding hands with her husband, who was perched beside her on his motorized wheelchair. The attending oncologist gulped, took a deep breath, and began to break the news as gently as he could. Expecting to meet a flood of tears, he finished by expressing how sorry he was.

To the team’s surprise, however, no tears flowed. Instead Mimi looked over at her husband with a broad smile and said, “Do you know what day this is?” Somewhat perplexed, the oncologist had to admit that he did not. “Today is very is special,” said Mimi, “because it was 60 years ago this very day that my Jim and I were married.”

The team members reacted to Mimi with astonishment. How could an elderly woman with an ailing husband who had just been told that she had a second, lethal cancer respond with a smile? Compounding the team’s amazement, she then went on to share how grateful she felt for the life she and her husband had shared.

Mimi thanked the attending oncologist and the members of the team for their care, remarking how difficult it must be to deliver bad news to very sick patients. Instead of feeling sorry for herself, Mimi was expressing sympathy for the people caring for her, exhibiting a remarkable generosity of spirit in the face of a grim disease.

The members of the team walked out of Mimi’s room shaking their heads in amazement. Once they reached the hallway, the attending physician turned and addressed the group: “Mimi isn’t the only person in that room with cancer, but she is surely the sickest. And yet,” he continued, to nods all around, “she is also the healthiest of any of us.”

“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.” – John Donne

Disease need not define us

Mimi’s reaction highlights a distinction between disease and illness, the importance of which is becoming increasingly apparent. Simply put, a body has a disease, but only a person can have an illness. Different people can respond very differently to the same diagnosis, and those differences sometimes correspond to demographic categories, such as male or female. Mimi is a beautiful example of the ability to respond with joy and gratitude in the face of even life’s seemingly darkest moments.

Consider another very different patient the cancer team met with shortly after Mimi. Ron, a man in his 40s who had been cured of lymphoma, arrived in the oncology clinic expecting the attending oncologist to sign a form stating that he could not work and therefore qualified for disability payments. So far as the attending knew, there was no reason Ron couldn’t hold a job.

Ron’s experience of disease was very different from Mimi’s, a phenomenon familiar to cancer physicians. Despite a dire prognosis, Mimi was full of gratitude. Ron, by contrast, though cured of his disease and apparently completely healthy, looked at his life with resentment, even anger. He felt deeply wronged by his bout with cancer and operated with a sense that others should do what they could to help make it up to him.

Mimi was dying but content with her life. Ron was healthy but filled with bitterness. Both patients had the same diagnosis – cancer – but the two human beings differed dramatically, and so too did their illness experiences. Mimi felt blessed by 60 years of a good marriage, while Ron saw in his cancer just one more example of how unfair life had been to him.

“Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so…” – John Donne

The real meaning of health

When the members of the cancer team agreed that Mimi was the healthiest person in the room, they were thinking of health in terms of wholeness or integrity. In fact, the word health shares the same source as the word whole, implying completeness or fullness. Ron felt repeatedly slighted, but Mimi looked at life from a perspective of abundance.

A full life is not necessarily marked by material wealth, power over others, or fame. Many people who live richly do so modestly and quietly, never amassing fortunes, commanding legions, or seeing their picture in the newspaper. What enriches their lives is not success in the conventional sense but the knowledge that they have done their best to remain focused on what really matters.

Mimi easily called to mind many moments when she and those she cared about shared their company and their love. Any sense of regret or sorrow over what might have been quickly gave way to a sense of gratitude for what really was, still is, and will be. Her outlook on life was shaped by a deep conviction that it had a meaning that would transcend her own death.

When someone has built up a life ledger full of meaningful experiences, the prospect of serious illness and death often do not seem so threatening. For Mimi, who had lived most of her days with a keen awareness that they would not go on forever, death’s meaning had been transformed from “Life is pointless” to “Make every day count.”

Mimi regarded the prospect of dying as a lens through which to view the meaning of life. She saw her illness as another adventure through which she and Jim would pass. Death would separate them, but it would also draw them closer together, enabling them to see more clearly than ever how much their love meant to them.

From Mimi’s point of view, death is not a contaminant, fatally introduced to life at its final stage. Instead death is a fire that burns away all that is not essential, purifying a person’s vision of what is most real and most worth caring about. Though not happy to be ill, Mimi was in a profound sense grateful for death. Her sentiments echo those of the poet John Donne:

“One short sleep past and we wake eternally: And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”

Complete Article HERE!

The Wisdom of End-of-Life Care

Buddhist teacher Frank Ostaseski has been one of the leading voices in contemplative end-of-life care since the 1980s.

By Lion’s Roar Staff

[I]n this video, Ostaseski talks with Lion’s Roar’s Lindsay Kyte about the lessons he’s learned at the bedsides of thousands of dying people, his new book The Five Invitations, and the future of end-of-life care.

Complete Article HERE!

What Is Day Of The Dead, And What Can It Teach You About The Grief Process?

The Mexican holiday has nothing to do with Halloween, but lots to do with normalizing death.

[T]his summer, it seemed like death was everywhere. In the course of a few short weeks I had a miscarriage and watched my dog be struck and killed as we walked down our dead-end road. Two weeks later, my aunt unexpectedly passed away in her sleep.This trio of tragedies would have left anyone reeling, but I realized that I was hurting deeply in part because I didn’t have an adequate vocabulary to talk about death. This was especially evident when I tried to answer questions posed by my 3-year-old daughter, who kept inquiring about our dog and her great aunt for months. I wanted her to understand that death was normal and even expected, but I was having a hard time remembering that myself. (Here are 5 reasons you should talk about death, even if you don’t want to.)

And then, by chance, I stumbled upon information about Dia de Los Muertos—Day of the Dead—and I was captivated. Day of the Dead is most commonly celebrated in Mexico, although other South American countries celebrate as well. It’s believed that spirits arrive on October 31 and leave on November 2. November 1, however, is the main day of celebration, and the day most commonly referred to as Day of the Dead.

Most Americans, if they have even heard of the holiday, associate it with Halloween and colorfully painted skulls. But despite the coincidental timing, it’s really a fun-filled but complex acknowledgement of death as part of life, and it combines the Catholic All Saint’s Day with indigenous traditions and beliefs.

People who celebrate it believe that, on and around November 1, spirits can easily pass between our world and the afterlife. Families might set extra places at the table, exchange stories, and prepare gifts for their deceased loved ones. But mostly the day is about fun, since many people believe spirits would be insulted if they came back to find everyone in mourning.

This seemed vastly different from how many Americans view life, death, and grieving, so I wanted to learn more. It turns out there’s a whole lot that we could all learn from Dia de Los Muertos about the grief process.

Death is a part of life.
I’ve always thought of life and death as opposites. However, Day of the Dead celebrates death as a part of life, rather than the end of it. And recognizing that life and death go hand-in-hand can ease the grieving process, says Kriss Kevorkian, PhD, an expert on grief.

“Day of the Dead connects life and death in a way that, generally speaking, Americans don’t often do,” says Kevorkian. People who celebrate it realize that their loved ones are still present in their lives, even if they aren’t physically there. “You’re not taught to believe that once your loved one dies that’s it.” By normalizing death, the grieving process also becomes normalized and less of something to fear.

A relationship doesn’t end just because someone has died.
“The first chapter of grieving is really recognizing that someone is gone from this world, and your relationship with them is changing” rather than ending, says Tracee Dunblazier, a spiritual empath and grief counselor based in Los Angeles. Whether you believe like Dunblazier does that it’s possible to communicate with the dead, or you merely believe in keeping them alive through memories, recognizing that some sort of relationship can be maintained can be very healing.

“When you think of death as final, you’re looking from a specific sliver of a perspective that does not show the whole story,” Dunblazier says.

Grief doesn’t follow a strict timeline.
When someone you love dies, everyone expects you to struggle—but only for a little while. The problem, of course, is that people don’t heal on schedule, and sometimes it takes months or even years to “move on,” especially after someone passes unexpectedly. This idea is known as complicated grief, and Western cultures usually view it as something to treat (perhaps with therapy and/or antidepressants).

Cultures that celebrate Day of the Dead, however, don’t try to force a sense of closure. Having a holiday that acknowledges the presence of the dead can make complicated grief easier to address, particularly on November 1, when the spirits are thought to be nearby. Believing that your loved ones can hear and understand you on this holiday means that you have the chance to say anything that was left unsaid before they died, says Merrie Haskins, a counselor and psychotherapist based in Minnesota.

Funerals (or at least memorials) can be fun.

In America, death is a very somber event. We wear black to funerals and talk in hushed tones. However, anyone who has ever listened to a lovingly-delivered eulogy knows that smiles and laughter are an important part of the grieving process. Although South American cultures have sad funerals as well, they incorporate happiness and fun into Day of the Dead to honor their loved ones in a more spirited way. That’s something that’s not common in American culture. (See how these 3 alternative therapies can help heal your grief, according to Prevention Premium.)

“We don’t usually have a celebration with levity, happiness, song, and dance,” says Shoshana Ungerleider, MD, chair of the End Well Symposium, an organization that focuses on quality end-of-life care. “People who celebrate the Day of the Dead take this lightness very seriously, due to the belief that spirits who come to visit would be insulted if they found everyone in mourning.”

Haskins suggests adopting that focus on fun as a way to celebrate your loved ones. For example, each year she attends an Academy Award viewing party given in honor of a particular deceased family member who used to love watching the awards show. “That makes it fun for us to remember her and for new people to get to hear about how wonderful she was,” she says.

Stop fearing death, and your own death will be better.
Everyone dies, but many people are too terrified to think about it—to their detriment. “In America, we often shy away from talking about death, loss, and grief. As a physician, I see many gravely sick people in the hospital who have never considered what they want at the end of life,” Ungerleider says. As a result, their final days can be stressful for them as well as their families, because everyone is struggling to make decisions that align with their beliefs while simultaneously dealing with the grief of imminent loss.

A celebration like Day of the Dead can make people think about their own death and plan for what they want at the end of their lives. “By accepting and discussing openly that death is a part of life, you make sure you receive the care you want.”

Complete Article HERE!

Dia de los Muertos (Day Of The Dead) 2017

[M]ore than 500 years ago, when the Spanish Conquistadors landed in what is now Mexico, they encountered natives practicing a ritual that seemed to mock death.

It was a ritual the indigenous people had been practicing at least 3,000 years. A ritual the Spaniards would try unsuccessfully to eradicate.

A ritual known today as Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.

The ritual is celebrated in Mexico and certain parts of the United States. Although the ritual has since been merged with Catholic theology, it still maintains the basic principles of the Aztec ritual, such as the use of skulls.

Today, people don wooden skull masks called calacas and dance in honor of their deceased relatives. The wooden skulls are also placed on altars that are dedicated to the dead. Sugar skulls, made with the names of the dead person on the forehead, are eaten by a relative or friend, according to Mary J. Adrade, who has written three books on the ritual.

The Aztecs and other Meso-American civilizations kept skulls as trophies and displayed them during the ritual. The skulls were used to symbolize death and rebirth.

The skulls were used to honor the dead, whom the Aztecs and other Meso-American civilizations believed came back to visit during the monthlong ritual.

Unlike the Spaniards, who viewed death as the end of life, the natives viewed it as the continuation of life. Instead of fearing death, they embraced it. To them, life was a dream and only in death did they become truly awake.

“The pre-Hispanic people honored duality as being dynamic,” said Christina Gonzalez, senior lecturer on Hispanic issues at Arizona State University. “They didn’t separate death from pain, wealth from poverty like they did in Western cultures.”

However, the Spaniards considered the ritual to be sacrilegious. They perceived the indigenous people to be barbaric and pagan.

In their attempts to convert them to Catholicism, the Spaniards tried to kill the ritual.

But like the old Aztec spirits, the ritual refused to die.

To make the ritual more Christian, the Spaniards moved it so it coincided with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day (Nov. 1 and 2), which is when it is celebrated today.

Previously it fell on the ninth month of the Aztec Solar Calendar, approximately the beginning of August, and was celebrated for the entire month. Festivities were presided over by the goddess Mictecacihuatl. The goddess, known as “Lady of the Dead,” was believed to have died at birth, Andrade said.

Today, Day of the Dead is celebrated in Mexico and in certain parts of the United States and Central America.

“It’s celebrated different depending on where you go,” Gonzalez said.

In rural Mexico, people visit the cemetery where their loved ones are buried. They decorate gravesites with marigold flowers and candles. They bring toys for dead children and bottles of tequila to adults. They sit on picnic blankets next to gravesites and eat the favorite food of their loved ones.

In Guadalupe, the ritual is celebrated much like it is in rural Mexico.

“Here the people spend the day in the cemetery,” said Esther Cota, the parish secretary at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. “The graves are decorated real pretty by the people.”

Complete Article HERE!

‘Memento Mori’: USU exhibit focuses on the art of death and mourning

Michael Wolgemut’s 1943 piece “The Dance of Death”

By Sean Dolan

[D]ylan Burns doesn’t dwell on the fact that he will eventually die, but he is aware of the inevitable.

That’s one of the side effects of spending several months preparing an art exhibit that celebrates the macabre. Burns, the digital scholarship librarian at Utah State University’s Merrill-Cazier Library, is the curator of, “Memento Mori: The Art of Death and Mourning.”

The exhibit itself is a reminder of death. Black curtains beckon the viewer to stand in the center of tall white boards arranged in the shape of a coffin. Inside the display, images of skulls and centuries-old drawings of dancing skeletons hand-picked from rare books in the library’s special collections invite the silent contemplation of death.

“The whole exhibit asks this question — implores people to ‘memento mori,’ which is ‘remember that you’ll die,’” Burns said. “And that’s something that I think we don’t do that often in our contemporary world.”

Bruns found inspiration for the exhibit in a collection of Compton Studio photographs, a family-run company founded in Brigham City in 1884. In addition to documenting life in Utah, the Compton Studio took elaborate funeral photos.

Dylan Burns

In one photo, three young children stare bleakly into the camera as their deceased sibling lies motionless in a cradle.

“They’re extraordinarily striking and intimate,” Burns said.

At the time, Burns said funerals and the handling of the deceased was generally left to the family. When a grandmother died, for example, the body would be washed, dressed and displayed in the parlor. Friends would come and pay tribute.

Over the past 100 years, Burns said death has become more sterile. As soon as someone dies, they are whisked away and embalmed behind closed doors, only to be seen briefly by the family.

“We have funeral homes and they take care of everything and it’s all kind of sanitized and it’s out of the home and out of the family,” he said.

Burns isn’t suggested that everyone should go out and wash their next dead family member, unless they want to. But there is a movement in some funeral homes called, “The Order of the Good Death,” which encourages people to approach death with a different attitude. Instead of fear and anxiety, this movement reminds people that death is a part of life.

“It’s sad, but it is what it is,” Burns said.

Using the funeral photos as a jumping off point, Burns then took a deep dive into the library’s special collections to find old sources that reminded one to “memento mori.”

Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius’s 1543 publication called, “De Humanis Corporis Fabrica,” depicts scientifically accurate sketches of skeletons with an artistic flare.

Burns said Vesalius was a doctor who made a significant contribution to the world’s medical knowledge. In addition to scientific experiments and dissections, Vesalius posed and sketched skeletons in ways that gives the appearance of contemplation of demise and death.

‘Memento Mori’: The art of death and mourning

“Yeah, they’re weird,” Burns said. “The point that I’m making here is I’m talking about these memento moris, which are these objects that remind you that we are going to die.”

One of the most striking, and locally significant, example of a memento mori is the skull of Old Ephraim, the mightiest grizzly bear known in Logan Canyon.

“We’re reminded that even the most powerful can’t escape death,” Burns said.

Another section of the exhibit is devoted to the allegory of the Danse Macabre, or the Dance of Death, which depicts motifs of skeletons dancing with the living. The exhibit displays the work of Hans Holbein, a 16th century German artist. Holbein drew skeletons interacting with powerful people, like the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope.

“No matter who you were, it came for everyone,” Burns said.

The exhibit, which will remain on display until Dec. 10, coincides with the library’s Family Art Day this Saturday. The event’s theme is, “Telling a Spooky Story — With Art!”

Children are invited to create Halloween-themed silhouettes from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. If they desire to explore the morbidity of death, kids can check out the adjacent “Memento Mori” exhibit.

Burns said part of his intention was to just invite people to think and talk about death. It’s going to happen to everyone, but it’s rarely discussed.

“I don’t think it’s healthy for it to be a taboo subject that we never talk about,” Burns said.

Complete Article HERE!

Remember that you will die

By Bonnie Kristian

I don’t often think about death.

Well, to be precise, I don’t think about my own death. So rarely, in fact, do such personally existential topics occur to me that my far more reflective husband has suggested we may be of different species.

But I do think about other people’s deaths almost daily — not in, like, a serial killer way, but in that my occupation as a writer covering politics and current events means death constantly invades my work. There’s death in the headlines as soon as I wake up and death in the policy topics, like foreign affairs and criminal justice reform, on which I often offer commentary. Last year I completed a seminary degree, and I wrote my master’s thesis on the theology surrounding the death of Christ.

It is that exposure to death, distant but incessant, which perhaps made a line from late night host Jimmy Kimmel’s mournful monologue on the mass shooting in Las Vegas so striking to me. “I just want to laugh about things every night, but seems to [be] becoming increasingly difficult lately,” he said. “It feels like someone has opened a window into hell.”

What happened in Las Vegas was indeed hellish, but the window is not newly open. This is the way our world has worked throughout the great bulk of history, and it is the way it continues to work around much of the globe today. Think of the persistent evils of conquest and slavery and genocide, plague and flood and fire. Think of the Lisbon earthquake, which in 1755 killed as many as 100,000 people and caused so much anguish it changed the course of European philosophy. Think of the famine and cholera in Yemen right now, where conditions are so dire children are dying of dehydration in the womb. Think of the slaughter in Myanmar, the decimation of Puerto Rico, the refugee crisis in the Middle East.

Yes, we have a window open to hell, but we did not open it last weekend in Las Vegas. It has been open a very long time.

Here in the United States in the start of the 21st century, we are significantly insulated from natural and man-made evils alike. Make no mistake: I do not mean to discount real suffering or to suggest that such insulation is a bad thing. Far to the contrary, it is wonderful to live in a time and place as historically prosperous and safe as ours. For all our debates about health care, for example, we modern Americans are justifiably confident that we will not meet our end in an epidemic of bubonic plague, our bodies consigned to a mass grave stacked — as one medieval Italian put it — “just as one makes lasagna with layers of pasta and cheese.”

But our insulation comes with side effects. It makes us unduly surprised and incapable of appropriate response when grave evils do befall us. We are fixated on asking how such an evil could happen to the detriment of more valuable questions.

As a potential remedy, I propose reviving memento mori, the practice of remembering death. Though there are injunctions to meditate on mortality to be found in pre-Christian and non-Western philosophy, memento mori — Latin for “remember that you will die” — is classically a Christian phenomenon that flourished in the Western world from the Middle Ages through Victorian times.

Memento mori was never a single act or image, but its most identifiable form is the representation of death and the fleeting passage of time in medieval and Renaissance art. Skulls were a favorite theme, as were running hourglasses, wilting flowers, and burning candles. Sometimes full skeletons appeared, inviting people from all walks of life to join the inevitable danse macabre. In poem and fresco alike, the story of “The Three Living and the Three Dead” saw three kings meeting three walking corpses of monarchs past. “Quod fuimus, estis; quod sumus, vos eritis” — what we were, you are; what we are, you will be — the corpses say, cautioning the kings against a frivolous and immoral life.

That warning is central to the message of memento mori, which is neither an effort “to find comfort in the commonality of our mortal lot” nor the indulgence in morbidity and despair it may initially seem. The point of remembering that you will die is to reflect on how you are living now: If life is fleeting, it is all the more important to use it well. For Christians, it is equally a reminder of our hope in the victory of Christ and the coming destruction of death itself. As we remember death, we also remember it will not have the final word. “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

Still, I am going to die. You are going to die. We are all going to die. That is something we should remember.

Memento mori should not make us cynical about death and other evils, but rather mindful that they are happening to others and better prepared for when they happen to us. This mental habit becomes all the more necessary when you live, like Jimmy Kimmel and me, in circumstances where “laugh[ing] about things every night” is plausible. It is a habit that keeps us from being taken by surprise that our world has a window open to hell, and that keeps us doing what we can to shut it.

Complete Article HERE!