Tag: Death Spirituality

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Illness and death are facts of life

– Buddhism teaches us to be mindful but not fearful of it

‘It doesn’t take a deep understanding of Buddhism to acknowledge that sickness, old age, and death are inevitable facts of life.’

The art of developing a healthy relationship with our own mortality lies in neither avoiding the reality of suffering nor obsessing over it

By Nadine Levy

Over the last year, I have spent a lot of time eating pre-packaged sandwiches in hospital cafeterias. I often joke that those of us who are lucky enough to hit 35 will have at least one, if not multiple, serious health scares every year. At some point, however, we will face much more than a simple scare – serious illness can impact anyone, any time, with little notice.

As well as being a source of stress, pain and discomfort, unwanted health diagnoses have the radical potential to upend our lives and ignite burning questions relating to impermanence and human suffering which we may not have considered in the past. We may come face-to-face with our shared vulnerability for the first time – which was present all along – as well as the indisputable fact that we are all but one breath away from a health crisis or poor prognosis.

Working with our mortality in a meaningful way can be challenging. For one, we live in a death-averse culture in which comforting and life-affirming ways of thinking and talking about illness and death are rare. Further, the unprecedented nature of Covid-19, as well as an increase in self-diagnosis via the internet (“cyberchondria”), has been associated with an overall rise in health anxiety.

In the founding story of Buddhism, the historical Buddha, a sheltered 29-year-old prince, ventures out of his palace and for the first time encounters sickness, ageing, and death on the streets of what is now Nepal. These sights impact him in such a visceral and immediate way that he is compelled to relinquish his wealth and material comforts to enter a life of asceticism, contemplation, and reflection.

It doesn’t take a deep understanding of Buddhism to acknowledge that sickness, old age, and death are inevitable facts of life. Many of us know this intimately. However, we may not realise that the more we deny this truth and cling to a fantasy of perpetual health and youthfulness, the more we suffer.

This is not to dismiss our attempts at living a healthy lifestyle that prevents ill health. Indeed, moderation and cultivating physical and mental wellbeing are at the heart of Buddhist practice. Still, we face the cruel irony that even our best efforts to address risk factors through diet, exercise, and supplementation, often fall short. Mark Twain once said, “I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly.”

On my first overseas trip as a child, I witnessed individuals with debilitating and treatable illnesses in plain sight. One afternoon, I went to a cafe for lunch and couldn’t swallow my sandwich. As hard as I tried, I could not force the muscles in my throat to perform their job. There was a lump in my throat that persisted. The sharp edges of the human condition had suddenly shifted from theory to reality.

I encountered Buddhism a few years later and I was relieved to find an approach that did not look away from what was true: the body deteriorates, decays, and changes. It is made up of the elements and is of the nature to sicken, age, and die. While death is certain, the time of death is uncertain. Do not turn away from your mortality.

Later, I downloaded an app that reminded me daily I was going to die, though I’m not sure I needed the reminder.

Was this a type of exposure therapy that would liberate me from my worst fears, or was it simply making my anxiety worse?

Years later, I confided in a Buddhist teacher about my ongoing health anxiety, and he said something that changed the way I now view the Buddhist practice of death contemplation: the art is not to be anxiously fixated on death but simply mindful of it. The invitation was to extend a gentle and curious gaze to our fear of death itself. This seems a subtle point, but one that has enormous significance.

First, it invites us to bring awareness to how we relate to and perceive our impermanence. What is it that scares us exactly? The psychotherapist, Irvin Yalom talks about death and health anxiety being a placeholder for a range of natural existential concerns – from fear of pain, loss, and separation from loved ones to terror of our ultimate annihilation. At times, it correlates with deep disappointment that our life has lacked meaning or purpose.

Once we become familiar with what “health” or “death” represent in our unique psyche, we can bring attention to when and how these fears present themselves. Do particular sensations, memories, or emotions trigger these fears? Are they felt predominantly in the body or in a mind that races and tries to fix and control? Do you find yourself reaching for your phone? Instead, can you remain in the here and now, with a racing heart, lump in your throat, images of a poor prognosis, or your final breath? Can you stay put and allow the fears to arise, change, and dissipate? The practice is to avoid the extremes of obsessing about the finitude of our life on the one hand and avoiding our mortality on the other. Acceptance and wisdom lie in the place in between.

You and I will die. Can we stay steady in our seat knowing this with certainty, while remaining open to a broader indescribable mystery which may well outperform our wildest expectations?

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The Day Ram Dass Died

— He taught me to be more curious, present, and self-loving. His final lesson was more surprising.

By Christopher Fiorello

I woke up every thirty minutes the night before Ram Dass died. Stretching my perception through the big divider that separated his study—where I lay on a narrow couch—from his bedroom, I’d count the seconds between the short, ragged breaths churning through his sleep-apnea machine.

Four years later, I still have no idea why I was chosen to watch over him that night. I was at the bottom of the caregiver pecking order when it came to things directly related to Ram Dass’s body. I lacked the size and strength to transfer him from bed to wheelchair, or wheelchair to recliner, on my own; was too much of a novice to help organize his schedule or coördinate with his doctors; and was too unfamiliar to offer intellectual comfort in the rare moments that he wanted to talk. I’d met him ten months earlier, had his voice in my head for just three years. There were people in the house, on Maui, who had known him for more than three decades.

Before arriving, I had no formal medical training, but I had done three weeks of volunteering at a hospice facility in anticipation of coming to the island. Most of it involved moving Kleenex and changing the amount of light in empty rooms. Several times I sat with the dying. It was overwhelming to look at their closed eyes, feeling the heaviness in the room, the sense of something happening or about to happen. I scanned their faces for signs of pain, of fear or bliss, of transcendence. Through the palliative haze of opioids, they were impossible to read. No one was thrashing in pain; no one was smiling, either.

But it somehow buoyed me, being so close to death. The heaviness seemed critically important to my spiritual growth. I imagined myself giving peace to the dying through my presence, and in the process conquering my own fear of leaving life behind.

During my time with Ram Dass, I flitted constantly between self-righteousness and self-pity, one day indulging in grandiose fantasies that I was the heir to his legacy, charged with scattering his ashes, and the next imagining that everyone in the house hated me. The caregivers called it the classroom or the fire—a site of purifying work, a pathway to enlightenment.

My own work, purifying or otherwise, consisted mostly of handling various chores needed to keep a six-bedroom cliffside home with a pool, guesthouse, and two-acre yard going. For the bits that mattered—the scrubbing and the laundry and the cooking—there was a team of cleaners and a rotating cast of chefs. I ended up doing a lot of the rest: separating recycling, washing dishes, and replacing cat-scratched screens. There were three other caregivers in the house, and I was given a modest salary, plus my own room, meals, and shared access to a truck. I was an employee, but most days the house felt like a family, for better or worse.

Still, this was only the second time I’d been asked to spend the night in the study. It was generally perceived as an act of intense devotion: accepting a horrible night’s sleep, on a couch that reeked of cat pee, while facing the prospect of Ram Dass dying on your watch. I hated it, but I was there to care for the guy however it was decided that he needed care.

Most of the deciding was done by a woman affectionately dubbed Dassi Ma, a seventysomething lapsed-Catholic firecracker from Philadelphia. Dassi Ma was Ram Dass’s primary caretaker, and, though she no longer did the more strenuous physical tasks, she was still in command of what he got and when, often more so than Ram Dass himself. He was eighty-eight, and his health had been steadily deteriorating owing to a host of issues, including chronic infections. When I moved to Maui to be near him, in February, 2019, he had almost died the night I arrived. He bounced back, to everyone’s surprise but his own. “It wasn’t time,” I remember him saying in his stoic way, neither relieved nor disappointed. Now he had another spreading infection, and what appeared to be a cracked rib from being transferred to and from his wheelchair.

Ram Dass’s life is the subject of multiple documentaries, an autobiography, and a docuseries in development starring “High Maintenance” ’s Ben Sinclair. He was born Richard Alpert in 1931 to a wealthy Boston family. His pedigree was sterling: a Stanford psychology Ph.D., tenure track at Harvard, visiting professorship at Berkeley. In 1963, after five years at Harvard—much of it spent studying psychedelics with his fellow-psychologist Timothy Leary—he was fired for giving psilocybin mushrooms to an undergraduate.

He bopped around for a few years, often taking obscene amounts of mind-altering substances with Leary at the Hudson Valley estate of his friend Peggy Hitchcock. In 1967, like so many other Westerners of the time, he travelled to India in pursuit of exotic answers to life’s biggest questions. He’d grown disenchanted with the psychedelic world, which had come to seem rotely defined by highs and comedowns. In India, he met a Californian hippie named Kermit Riggs and followed him to a village called Kainchi, in the Himalayan foothills, to meet Riggs’s guru.

The guru was an old, squat man named Neem Karoli Baba. Before long, an enthralled Alpert was reborn as Ram Dass, or roughly “servant of God.” He returned to America later that year, arriving at the airport dressed in white robes and with a long, scraggly beard, and began his career as a spiritual teacher. Most of what he talked about, from 1967 to his death, were the experiences he had with Neem Karoli Baba, whom he called Maharaj-ji (“great king”), and the spiritual beliefs that emerged from those experiences.

One of his main ports of call became death and dying. In 1981, he co-founded the Dying Center, in Santa Fe, an organization that described itself as “the first place specifically created to support and guide its residents to a conscious death.” The center sought, in effect, dying people who wanted to use their death to become spiritually enlightened, and staff members who wanted to use other people’s deaths to achieve the same. Even before the Dying Center took shape, Ram Dass was lecturing on the spirituality of death, its place in the natural order, and the starkly contrasting way that he believed it was perceived in the East. His teachings were rooted in a specific vision of metaphysical reality, as informed by his guru and by the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text. Roughly, he believed in nondualism, that there existed an unchanging and absolute entity—the Hindu Brahman, which Ram Dass more frequently called God, the divine, or oneness—from which all material reality came. Included in that reality were souls (something like the Hindu atman), which by their nature were caught in the illusion of their separateness from God, repeating a cycle of birth, suffering, death, and reincarnation until they remembered their true nature as part of the oneness—that is, until they became enlightened.

Death could be a crucial moment for remembering this nonduality, as it was when the “veil of separateness” was thinnest. In his 1971 book, “Be Here Now,” which has sold more than two million copies worldwide, Ram Dass summarizes his views: “You are eternal . . . There is no fear of death because / there is no death / it’s just a transformation / an illusion.”

He often spoke to crowds afraid of dying, repeating that he had “no fear of death.” He sat with people on their deathbeds and talked routinely about the power of “leaving the body,” his efforts to “quiet himself” so that the dying could see where they were in the reincarnation process and do what they could to escape it. His stories were sometimes graphic—people dying prematurely, or dying in tremendous pain—but always tinged with a lightness and humor.

Perhaps Ram Dass’s most memorable remarks about death came not from his own mind but from a woman named Pat Rodegast, who claimed she had channelled a spirit named Emmanuel from 1969 to her death, in 2012. Rodegast was working as a secretary, raising children, and practicing Transcendental Meditation when she began to see a light, which evolved into what she called telepathic auditory guidance. Some of that guidance was captured in three books published in the eighties and nineties, two of which came with forewords from Ram Dass. According to Ram Dass, when he asked Emmanuel what to tell people about death, Emmanuel replied that it was “absolutely safe,” “like taking off a tight shoe.”

I first encountered the voice of Ram Dass in 2016. I was twenty-seven and living in New York, in a Chinatown building that rattled every time an empty box truck drove down First Avenue. Each morning, I tumbled down five flights of sticky stairs and placed one of his talks deep into my ears, letting his distinct blend of scientific erudition and spiritual mysticism carry me across town.

He had a habit of segueing from psychological concepts, like attachment theory and childhood trauma, to cryptic ones, like Emmanuel’s messages and the astral plane, pausing briefly to ask listeners if they could really, truly “hear this.” He seemed to build on the insights of others who had revolutionized end-of-life care in America—thinkers such as the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross—but also spoke in the New Age argot of Alan Watts. I gobbled it all up, feeling my spiritual life deepen exponentially by the day. His lectures made me more prosocial, more anti-capitalist, more curious, and decidedly more self-loving.

This was my second rodeo with spirituality; growing up, a rigid strain of Protestantism had been foisted on me like a chore. In Kansas City, Missouri, I was enveloped by an atmosphere of creationism, tent revivals, and anti-abortion screeds. I still recall standing on a busy street as a six-year-old and holding a sign that read “Before I Formed You in the Womb I Knew You—God.”

The teachings of Ram Dass were nothing like that. They were straight out of the hippie movement, and seemed to license a more liberal, self-directed search for meaning. As the grind and filth of Manhattan wore me down, Ram Dass’s voice became a salve, a way to “wake up to the illusion of our separateness.” I turned to his work again and again—to ease my loneliness when, walking down the street, droves of people moved around me like I was a light post, or to arrogantly tell my ex-girlfriend that we would always be “together,” even though I’d already dumped her.

After a couple of years, I learned that I could actually meet Ram Dass, for free, by signing up for one of his “Heart-to-Hearts”—a one-on-one, hour-long Skype call he offered as a sort of public service. When my time came, and the man appeared onscreen, I was stunned into silence. I had thought of him as a spry, ethereal figure who existed only in decades-old recordings. This Ram Dass was very old and lived with fairly advanced aphasia, a side effect of a major stroke he’d had in 1997. His speech was slow—in our full hour, he said roughly sixty words—but not at all ponderous. I thought it gave him a mystical quality.

There was no format to the session; Ram Dass just smiled his winning smile and listened. At one point, after I’d nervously overshared, he told me, “You take yourself pretty seriously.” That struck me as profound, at least at the time, but what endured was more feeling than words. It seemed he had arrived at a place from which he could find genuine love for strangers like me. It didn’t strike me as brand positioning, or as a form of ego; I didn’t think he loved me in the sense that he wanted to be close, or even that he cared whether we got to know each other. I just believed he saw me as another soul, and that, in his view, made me worthy of kindness.

By then, I was walking around New York, trying desperately to feel connected to anything. I wanted what Ram Dass had. So I left the city, intending, among other things, to get him to show me how to have it.

The friend I’d discovered Ram Dass with had already moved to Neem Karoli Baba’s temple, in Taos, New Mexico. I visited him for a fortnight of cooking group meals, wandering through the snowy high desert, and hobnobbing with Maharaj-ji zealots, including one white teen-ager who insisted that he was the reincarnation of Krishna, one of Hinduism’s most revered avatars. Like the young Krishna of lore, he would steal away to the temple pantry to eat pure butter until caught.

Some of this evoked my childhood church, where kids compared how quickly they could transition into speaking in tongues, or flexed the depth of their personal relationship with Jesus while leading a collective prayer. But this was my first encounter with Neem Karoli Baba devotees; I figured followers would be a bit more mellow the farther I got from his temple. Toward the end of my stay, I met a longtime friend of Ram Dass. He saw that I was eager to do volunteer work—known as seva, Sanskrit for “service”—so, when he learned of my intent to find Ram Dass on Maui, he offered to put in a good word to Dassi Ma.

That recommendation made the seemingly impossible possible. People of all ages came to the island to be near Ram Dass. Some found their way into the group texts for arranging kirtan—living-room chanting sessions at Ram Dass’s house—or beach excursions. A few found opportunities to be useful around the house, or made friends with one of the live-in caregivers, enabling them to drop by every week or so. But to be offered to help care for Ram Dass, for pay, as a virtual nobody, was exceptionally rare.

Upon arriving at the house, I found it shot through with the same quasi-religious fervor I had seen at the temple. I was quickly intercepted by another caregiver and taken to a lean-to, in a nearby pasture, so that I could silently meditate with prayer beads. It was incredibly humid, and I got annihilated by mosquitoes. I returned to the house to find a living room packed with people chanting—mostly the Hanuman Chalisa, a devotional hymn that features verses like “With the lustre of your vast sway, you are propitiated all over the universe.” A collective effervescence filled the room, and I joined along, staring at hundreds of statuettes of religious figures while fighting back the sense that I was in church.

After more than an hour of chanting, we milled about, greeting one another over chai and snacks. Attendees swapped stories of Maharaj-ji’s miracles, told me that my presence must be part of his plan, sat smiling at Ram Dass’s feet, their hands over their hearts. During my year on Maui, Ram Dass’s foundation led retreats at a local resort, where hundreds of people would gather for spiritual talks and chanting. Inevitably, someone at these events would look at me with confusion or pity when I told them my name was Christopher. “He hasn’t given you a name yet?” the person would ask. Ram Dass often bestowed a Hindu name on people: Lakshman, Govinda, Hari, Devi. I was fine with Christopher.

But there were other moments, informal and fleeting, when I witnessed the mixture of play and profundity that first drew me to Ram Dass. One autumn morning, two other caregivers and I were helping him get through his daily routine—brushing teeth and hair, putting on clothes and hearing aids, making the bed—when I turned on Doja Cat’s “Go to Town,” a song I later learned was about cunnilingus. I cranked the volume, and the four of us started dancing with illicit glee. One caregiver jumped on the bed, another swung from the divider between the bedroom and the study, and Ram Dass waved his one mobile hand with bright eyes and a rascally smile.

Another day, I was alone with Ram Dass, helping him pick out a shirt. Though I spent nearly all my time in the house, I could count the hours we had been alone together on two hands, and most of them had involved food and drink, or foot massages, ostensibly to relieve the pain that he felt from diabetic neuropathy. On this day, the house was recovering from Ram Dass having been denied psilocybin owing to his health. I felt sorrow for him; the drug was, after all, the beginning of his spiritual journey more than five decades prior. I asked him if the house ever felt like a prison. A full minute of silence passed, with me standing over him in his walk-in closet. Eventually, he tapped his temple and said, “This is the prison.”

When morning broke on December 22, 2019, and Ram Dass was still alive, I allowed myself a moment of relief. Dassi Ma came up, looking short on sleep, and took his vitals. They were horrible. We snapped into action, trying to comfort Ram Dass until one of his doctors arrived.

The infection had pooled fluid in his lungs, which made every breath a burden. Wet, rattling half-breaths were punctuated by coughs of bloody mucus. He looked wrecked, but still managed a weak smile when his Chinese-medicine doctor told a joke at his bedside.

At some point, Dassi Ma and the doctor began talking in the study; other caregivers were on an oxygen-tank-and-essentials supply run. I was on one side of Ram Dass’s bed; on the other was his longtime co-author Rameshwar Das, a friend since Kainchi. Then Ram Dass started choking.

It wasn’t that different from any of the other horrible breaths he’d taken that morning, except that he just couldn’t breathe it. When he realized this, he turned to me with a look that haunts me even now: light eyes wide as quarters, mouth open, lips a bit rounded. I immediately panicked, calling for Dassi Ma and trying to get his adjustable bed as upright as possible so that he could clear his throat. Then, when that didn’t seem upright enough, I frantically tried to lug his torso up so that his head could hang over his waist; perhaps he could vomit his throat clear.

Thirty seconds had passed since he first lost his breath. Somewhere from near his feet, the doctor snapped at me: “You have to calm down!” It jolted me into an awareness that Ram Dass was dying, right there. Perhaps it did the same for Dassi Ma, because she sprang for the study, returned with a large framed photo of Neem Karoli Baba, and commanded him to focus. “Ram Dass! Maharaj-ji! Maharaj-ji!” she said, placing the photo at the foot of the bed. She told him that she loved him, that he could go. I told him that I loved him. And then Ram Dass stopped trying to breathe.

I was the only person to leave the room. Stumbling into the study, I picked up my phone, hands quivering, and sent word to the other caregivers: “RD’s dying imminently. Like within the next couple of minutes.”

The wind was screaming outside. On Maui’s North Shore, it wasn’t unusual for it to reach thirty, forty knots, rattling the windows and throwing palm fronds across the lawn. That day, it had blown from early in the morning, under a tightly woven blanket of gray clouds. Sitting in the study, I watched it bend the trees, felt the violence of it, indiscriminate.

Ram Dass believed that fear kept us from recognizing our interconnection to all things. “Change generates fear; fear generates contraction; contraction generates prejudice, bigotry, and ultimately violence,” he said. In his teachings, he often placed fear and love on opposing sides of the human experience. Fear was the by-product of the ego; love was the by-product of the soul that remained pure, in the moment, especially at the time of death. “When we are fully present,” Ram Dass wrote, “there is no anticipatory fear or anxiety because we are just here and now, not in the future.”

And yet this binary is precisely what made watching him die so disorienting. I’ve no idea what Ram Dass felt in those final moments, what he could see or hear. I don’t even really know if that was fear I saw in his eyes, though it certainly looked like it. Perhaps it was surprise or another sensation entirely, the rush of emptiness before a huge plunge into something tremendous.

Whatever it was, its existence seemed largely absent from his teachings. There were times when he acknowledged the pain and coarse brutality of death. In his book “Still Here” (2000), he writes:

Dying is often not easy. the stoppage of circulation and starving of the heart muscle. the inadequate transport of oxygen to tissues, the failure of organs. Where can we hope to stand in our own consciousness during such traumatic conditions, in order to die with clarity and grace?

Yet the emphasis he placed, over decades of lectures, on the importance of grace during death made so little space for terror—for how fear could coexist with presence, and even with love. In the minutes after his passing, the chasm between how he died and how I thought he was supposed to die reminded me of the betrayal I’d felt when, at sixteen, I flouted my mother’s and pastor’s admonitions and stopped asking God for protection, only to discover that a similar slew of terrible and wonderful things still happened to me.

In the house, too, marching through three days of death rituals before Ram Dass’s body was removed, I felt my spirituality slip its moorings. Late on the second night, his body lay on ice in his study—a rite he’d specifically requested, hoping that it would help those around him transcend their fear. I sat on the floor and peered up at his face through candlelight, his skin whitish blue and gaunt, his mouth slightly agape. I waited for grace, for him to speak reassuringly from some other plane of reality. Instead, I was taken back to our final moments together, where fear sutured me to each passing second. Not fear of the past or some uncertain future, but fear of the vast, strange intensity of what is.

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Speaking of death

— Christians have an opportunity to eschew euphemisms and talk honestly about mortality.

By Rachel Mann

When my father died a couple of years ago, my family asked me to take the lead in organizing his funeral. I was happy to take this role: I am an experienced cleric used to working with funeral directors, and I have a strong understanding of the funeral process. What I’d never previously experienced—at least not from the point of view of a grieving person—is how readily those involved in the ministrations around a death speak in euphemisms. Perhaps it was a token of my grief, but I was annoyed by how many people couldn’t even say that my dad had died; most people, including the funeral director, said, repeatedly, that he’d “passed.”

Does it matter? At one level, no. The phrase “passed away” has been used to refer to death for 500 years. Still, it troubles me theologically. I fear that the prevalence of using passed as a way of speaking (or not speaking) of death indicates a society frightened by the finality of death, one that has opted for an overly spiritualized response to the last enemy.

A common refrain in my clergy circles is about how, on visits to plan funeral services with the bereaved, the only person prepared to use the “D” word is the priest herself. The bereaved will typically resort to any number of euphemisms to avoid it. This is entirely understandable. Shock is a natural reaction to death and, as creatures of language, we may be inclined to retreat to clichés that seem to soften the blow.

Indeed, at one level, euphemisms are entirely comprehensible as strategies to avoid the things we struggle with most. As Voltaire noted, “One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.” This applies to any difficult aspect of life, not simply death. Terms like downsizing and rationalization have been used for decades in business settings to avoid speaking directly about job cuts. In almost every area of life that really matters or troubles us—from sex through to war—there are forms of words that have been found to smooth out what’s difficult.

If death is the greatest human fear, it is hardly surprising that most of us will find ways of avoiding talking about it. The sheer number of ways humans have of avoiding the “D” word is both a testament to our creativity and an indication of how much we fear death.

Yet I think one of the imperatives on us as Christians is to be as honest as we can about death. Priests in particular are called to help people to pray and prepare them for death. Ironically, in an age when Christians are often parodied as delusional fantasists, we in fact have something powerful to offer as people who model realism and honesty about death. And one way we do that is by avoiding euphemisms at the point of death. If euphemisms are deployed in part to soften the nature of something shocking and appalling, ironically they serve to draw greater attention to that which they are meant to conceal. By being carefully and humanely honest about the singular finality of death, both priests and laypeople may be key agents in helping the bereaved to come to terms with the simple fact that, in this life at least, their loved ones are gone.

I am not suggesting that Christians should be crass. I trust we will always be sensitive to death’s ability to strip any of us of our certainties. But the quiet acknowledgment of the final nature of death may be significant both pastorally and for mission. In being clear that death has a shocking finality about it, Christians—as people who are committed to resurrection and new life—may be better placed to speak the good news of Christ. One thing we should not be afraid of in our faith tradition is the bleak reality that God incarnate, Jesus Christ, actually died and died horribly. He did not fall asleep or pass over or, to quote George Eliot, “join the choir invisible.” He died, in a vile and appalling way.

Resurrection is predicated on death. This is a powerful message in an age and culture in which technology and market economics have created the illusion that life and growth are almost endless. Growth is taken to be always good—and to be fair, growth is often a sign of life. Yet Jesus invites us to remember that unless a kernel of wheat falls and dies it remains a single seed. Jesus himself models a way of living abundantly that is grounded in the unavoidable reality of death.

Increasingly I read stories of billionaires seeking to cheat death altogether. In a culture where medical technologies have extended life among the wealthy to unprecedented levels, Christianity retains a potent voice on the inescapability of death. Even more powerfully, the figure at the heart of the Christian faith, Jesus Christ, signals that a fulfilled and rich life is not by its nature dependent on its length. At a time when religious faith is often parodied as absurd, childish, and fantastical, there is a profound opportunity to speak to the privilege of individuals and societies that seek to isolate themselves from the facts of human existence.

I know that there is nothing much I can do, as an individual, about the use of passing as a euphemism for death. At the same time, I can think of no greater vocation as a person of faith than to speak honestly about death, trusting in that even deeper reality of God’s resurrection.

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I Love the Beautiful Chaos of a Jewish Funeral

— There is something quite moving about all this grief amongst all this routine.

By

It was only relatively recently that I learned that holding funerals within 24 hours was a Jewish custom, and not the general norm. I’ve been extremely lucky in having gone to quite few funerals, and almost all of these have been those of Jewish family members, so it simply didn’t occur to me that we might be doing anything unusual in having them so quickly. Without the understanding that this wasn’t standard practice, I didn’t consider it exceptional — but the impact it has on the process of mourning can be, in my opinion, a significant and unifying one.

In the Torah, we are told that “You shall bury him the same day. His body should not remain all night.” And traditionally, the urgency of the funeral is linked to the importance of returning the body to the earth and allowing the soul to return to God. As a culturally-not-religiously Jewish person, I was unaware of both the scriptural and spiritual reasoning until very recently. I would have placed the emphasis on the emotional reasoning, which argues that the immediate experience of loss, mourning and proximity to death is a deep pain to feel, and one which should not be undergone any longer than absolutely necessary. Now it seems clear to me that it’s more about custom than anything else. Either way, I have come to hold it as an immensely important, beautiful aspect of the Jewish culture around death.

In December, my great-great auntie Marjorie became quite ill and we as a family braced ourselves for an upcoming funeral. She, along with much of my family, lived in Manchester, so in the lead-up to her passing, the London sect of us were on slight tenterhooks in anticipation of journeying up on little notice. In these moments, the banal and the profound are forced to find some kind of harmony. When contemplating loss is simply too vast, logistics take on a special importance.

In some ways, the knowledge that you’re just waiting for a death to occur so that the chain of events can start to unfold can be quite tiring. Maintaining a state of urgency over an extended period of time is logistically and emotionally tricky, and having to be pragmatic in the face of something so sad can feel like an unnecessary added encumbrance. But ultimately, there is no actively good time for a funeral. No one is looking at their diary and finding the perfect date to dedicate to doing something none of us want to do. In some ways, recognizing that the funeral will be hard no matter what, and then allowing it to take precedence over all other commitments, is the best way to allow a loss the appropriate space it deserves in our lives.

When the day arrived, a large portion of it for me was taken up by travel. We woke up to cancelled trains — standard — and then huddled alongside however many other disgruntled passengers at Euston. My mum’s cousin Caroline and I ran at absolute breakneck pace through crowds of people to get seats as soon as the platform was announced. On the drive from the station to the cemetery, we passed innumerable family monuments: the prison to which my uncle was told his parents had been sent in a prank by his cousin, the sandhills where Caroline reported “practically torturing” my mum when they were little, the shop to which it was a very grown up privilege to be allowed to walk to alone. Despite most of my visits to Manchester now being for funerals, the city will always feel full of life. Our memories and our history are part of the fabric of the place, and so many of those who we’ve lost are kept alive in the stories we can’t help but keep telling.

The funeral itself was brief and beautiful. My great-great aunt was a truly incredible person whose innate kindness and protectiveness distinguished her as remarkable to everyone around her. With it all having to come together so quickly, the words people choose take on a special significance: they are candid, and emotional, and cut straight to the core.

And yet, alongside mourning and meaning exists the mundane. People keep being people, and we continue to have to get ourselves from A to B. On the journey back to the station after the funeral, I sat squashed between my uncle and my grandfather in the backseat of my great uncle’s car, and we sat for a short eternity in a gridlock outside my grandma’s primary school, entertained by stories about that time of her life. When we finally got to the station, we caught a train by the skin of our teeth. By holding funerals so quickly, we force our lives to fit into the space around them, and require them to find a way to enmesh themselves into the day to day. There is something quite moving about all this grief amongst all this routine.

Sitting on trains gives you the wonderful gift of time to think. I reflected on my privileged position, experiencing the funeral of someone so beloved as a peripheral mourner, and how this offered another insight into the magic of having a funeral within 24 hours of a death. With this custom, in the direct aftermath of losing someone the people closest to the deceased are immediately wrapped in love. Their family and friends flock to them and make sure they aren’t alone with their grief. The initial experience of living without someone involves being in a room full of people who are there to remember and celebrate them. A funeral within 24 hours catches you just as you fall into the abyss.

And whilst there are undeniable impracticalities, the system manages to account for most. For those who are unable to make it, attending a shiva in the coming days offers them another chance to support and commemorate and mourn for themselves, as well as to contribute to the elongation of the period in which those closest to the deceased are surrounded by care. Whilst the funeral comes quickly, this does not mark the end of the grieving process — rather, it’s the beginning of the talking, processing and feeling. I am grateful that, thanks to Jewish custom, that beginning starts within 24 hours of a death. It’s exactly what we need.

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“That’s for remembrance”

– A recipe for garlic and rosemary lamb

Rosemary in bloom

By

I wrote half of last month’s column in an airport, trying to get to my grandmother before it was too late. Neither of us made it; she was gone before I even boarded. When I was done ugly crying – on the phone to my cousin as he broke the news, then again in front of the alarmed workers of the airport Costa – I wanted to metaphorically tear up everything I’d written and start on this instead, even if I didn’t have a clear idea of what this was yet, beyond something about rosemary’s tie to memory and a roast lamb no one would ever make for me again.

But it was the Winter Solstice coming up, and my first entry in a column on the place where food and magic intersect; and, crucially, it was too close to that moment of raw grief to pull it together into something coherent, something worthwhile. So I finished that piece on tea and mead and spices and the interwoven debts that we owe each other, and I’m bringing this to you now instead.

Rosemary is the herb of memory. I miss my grandmother.

When dealing with traditional herbal correspondences it can be hard to separate the magical from the mundane. Partly because our ancestors didn’t make that distinction themselves, seeing magic, faith, and physical medicine as part of a single whole in a world entirely imbued with the sacred. But also because, as traditional herbcraft has faded out of practice, attributions which were once meant to be understood literally can seem like metaphor or mysticism, only to then surprise us when we rediscover their physical nature. Rosemary, and the impact it has on memory, is one such example.

When Ophelia includes the herb in her list of accusatory flowers, it’s easy to assume her famous quote, “rosemary, that’s for remembrance” is as metaphorical as the rest. But rosemary has long been a herb associated with funerary rites, with death, and with remembrance of the departed, traditionally being placed on the biers of the dead. Its strong smell, which lingers in the room like a memory, would have helped to cover the beginnings of decay, as well as indelibly tying itself to that moment of grief and loss in the mourner’s neurology. Scent is one of the key triggers of memory, even with substances that don’t specifically effect cognition – how much more powerful rosemary’s impact then, with the discovery that it does.

Rosemary has other folkloric ties to memory outside of the funeral parlour – with Ancient Greek students supposedly using it as a study aid, and Sir Thomas Moore declaring the herb sacred to friendship because it provokes remembrance of the living, not just the dead.

As modern medical research examines herblore to see if there are effective treatments that have been overlooked, or that can be made effective with modern scientific techniques, rosemary has had its turn in the laboratory. Studies indicate that ingesting rosemary enhances recall speed as well as improves episodic and working memory, and may even have a positive impact on Alzheimers, though more research needs to be done to understand why.

Even inhaling the scent of rosemary seems beneficial, though the impact is smaller, and works best if the subject is exposed to the scent both during the learning process and then again when asked to recall things later on – scent as a memory trigger, enhanced by the effects of rosemary’s unique chemical composition on the brain.

A bouquet of herbs, including rosemary, in a bowl

This puts us in a position where rosemary is uniquely suited to remember and honour the beloved dead. Symbolically linked to the dead through religious rites and burial practices, tied to love and the transition from one life stage to another (it is worn at weddings as well as funerals), rosemary also helps us to remember in a literal, physical way. Eaten regularly, it may help preserve the memories of those departed, as well as prompting us to remember meals shared or time spent cooking together when the familiar scents reach us and work their neurological magic.

To combine the spiritual with the physical is a very powerful thing, grounding us in both realms at once, and binding them together in us. That which is gone is never really gone.

Garlic and Rosemary Lamb

Growing up, my grandmother was the only person who could cook a roast lamb I actually enjoyed eating. I don’t know how she did it, and she was a cooking by instinct sort of person so there are no recipes left behind. I still don’t eat lamb that much, though it’s appeared more often in my house since I married a New Zealander, but I knew it was exactly what I wanted to make for this column, and my grandmother. I hope you like it.

Lamb with rosemary and peppers

Lamb shoulder (900g)

Fresh rosemary (2 – 3 tablespoons, chopped)
3 bulbs of garlic
500g baby potatoes
125 ml red wine
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
Flour

Start by setting the oven to pre-heat at 240 C (220 C fan, ~450 F). While that’s heating up, mix four tablespoons of olive oil with eight cloves of crushed garlic, the rosemary, and the salt and pepper. When thoroughly mixed rub it all over the lamb shoulder. Halve the remaining garlic bulbs and place them with the potatoes in a roasting tray, drizzle with olive oil, crack salt and pepper over them, and then place the lamb on top. Finally, pour the wine over it all and cover with a tinfoil tent before placing it into the oven.

Let the lamb roast for fifty minutes and then remove the tinfoil for the final ten minutes to let it crisp up nicely. Once it’s done let the lamb rest for fifteen minutes. While the meat is resting, remove the garlic and potatoes from the tray so you can turn the drippings into a gravy by whisking in flour over a low heat until it reaches your preferred consistency.

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Terror Management Theory

— How Humans Cope With the Awareness of Their Own Death

By Cynthia Vinney, PhD

Terror Management Theory (TMT) suggests that human beings are uniquely capable of recognizing their own deaths and therefore they must manage the existential anxiety and fear that comes with knowing their time on Earth is limited.

The theory was developed by psychological researchers Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski, who published the first TMT article in 1986.1 They based TMT on the writings of Ernest Becker, who spoke of the need to protect against the universality of the terror of death.

In this article, we’ll review key concepts of TMT, look at empirical evidence in support of TMT, explore real-life examples of TMT, and discuss how it is used across different fields.

Key Concepts and Principles of Terror Management Theory

Terror Management Theory explains that people protect themselves against mortality salience, or awareness of one’s own death, based on whether their fears are conscious or unconscious.

If they’re conscious, people combat them through proximal defenses by eliminating the threat from their conscious awareness. If they’re unconscious, distal defenses, such as a sense of meaning, like cultural worldviews, or value, like self-esteem, diminish unconscious concerns about death.2

Cultural worldviews and self-esteem are key concepts of TMT. They are both central to protection against mortality salience. David Tzall, PsyD, a licensed psychologist in New York, notes, “TMT suggests that individuals gravitate towards and defend their cultural worldviews more strongly when confronted with thoughts of mortality.”

Through cultural worldviews, people can achieve literal or symbolic immortality. Literal immortality, the idea that we will continue to exist after our death, is usually the domain of religious cultural worldviews. Symbolic immortality is the idea that something greater than oneself continues to exist after their death, such as families, monuments, books, paintings, or anything else that continues to exist after they’re gone.

TMT suggests that individuals gravitate towards and defend their cultural worldviews more strongly when confronted with thoughts of mortality.

Self-esteem plays a significant role in TMT too. “When faced with the awareness of death,” Tzall says, “people often engage in activities or behaviors that boost their self-esteem as a way to manage the anxiety associated with mortality.” In so doing, they provide the sense that they are a valuable participant  in a meaningful universe.3

These have led to two important hypotheses in TMT. First, the mortality salience hypothesis says we have negative reactions to individuals from a different group, called “outgroupers,” who present a threat to our group, and have positive reactions to those who represent our cultural values, referred to as “ingroupers.” Second, the anxiety-buffer hypothesis says strengthening our anxiety-buffer by, for example, boosting self-esteem, should reduce the individual’s anxiety about death.4

Review of Empirical Evidence Supporting Terror Management Theory

There are over 500 studies conducted in countries around the world supporting TMT. For example, one study found that raising self-esteem reduces anxiety in response to images of death.5 Similarly, increasing self-esteem reduces the effects of mortality salience on the defense of one’s worldview. When the researchers provided positive personality feedback instead of neutral feedback, their preference for a US-based author was equivalent to that of the control group, whereas participants who received neutral feedback far exceeded the control group in preference for the author.6

Another study found that worldview threats increase accessibility of death thoughts. When Canadians were exposed to a website that either derogated Canadian values or Australian values, they had far more thoughts about death when they encountered the anti-Canadian information.7

Real-Life Examples Illustrating the Application of Terror Management Theory

There are many ways that terror management theory can be applied to real life. Tzall provides some examples, such as “religion where religious beliefs and practices offer explanations for life’s meaning, purpose, and what happens after death. People will turn to religion to alleviate existential anxiety and find solace in the idea of an afterlife.”

Believing in religion may provide a chance at literal immortality, but beyond that, it can provide a cultural worldview that brings meaning and purpose to life and can alleviate mortality salience.

Likewise, Tzall gives the example of belonging to a nation that “provides a sense of identity and belonging, which can help individuals feel connected to something enduring. People may strive to achieve success, create meaningful relationships, or contribute to society in ways that leave a lasting impact.” There are all sorts of ways that people can find meaning and achieve symbolic immortality, including being part of a nation that will go on after their death.

In addition to feeling like a part of the nation, people will want to put their own stamp on the nation whether through success in industry, meaningful relationships that have a lasting impact, or other options like volunteering, having a family, or writing a book.

Implications of Terror Management Theory across Different Fields

Different fields can use TMT in different ways. For example, the most obvious may be the field of therapy and counseling. As Tzall explains, “TMT sheds light on how individuals’ psychological well-being, self-esteem, and behavior are influenced by thoughts of mortality.” Tzall continues, this “can help therapists understand existential anxiety and develop strategies to address it.”

The theory can similarly be used in marketing and advertising, but the emphasis is different. “TMT can inform advertising strategies that tap into consumers’ desires for symbolic immortality,” Tzall says. In this conception, marketers and advertisers advertise goods or services in a way that communicates their desire for symbolic immortality can be met.

Similarly, political science “can help explain the polarization of political ideologies,” explains Tzall, “and the ways in which leaders appeal to their followers’ existential concerns to gain support.” Through cultural worldviews that appreciate others like them but reject others that are not like them, leaders can exploit their followers and even lead them to rise up against others that do not agree with them, in wars, conflicts, or events like January 6th, where a small group of like-minded citizens stormed Congress.

Significance of Terror Management Theory in Understanding Human Behavior and Beliefs

Though some studies about TMT have failed to be replicated, Terror Management Theory has continued to resonate with many people. And researchers still use it to describe various events.

For example, a group of researchers used TMT to detail the COVID-19 pandemic during its height, explaining that regardless of how deadly the virus is, the risk of dying was highly salient.8 As a result, in response to the pandemic, people responded to the constant fear of death in both proximal and distal ways.

In proximal ways: drinking and eating in excess to arguing that the virus isn’t nearly as lethal as health experts claim. And in distal ways: affirming an individual’s cultural worldview to maximizing one’s self-esteem, in line with the TMT literature. As threats that remind us of our own deaths continue and expand, TMT will continue to be a leading source of understanding human behavior and beliefs.

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My 2024 Goal Is To Have A Good Death

(But not this year)

By Ryvyn

American culture is extraordinarily goal-oriented. This January, pause and notice the messages and expectations that are motivating you. Everyone creates goals regarding all aspects of life. In a single day, we set a vast number of goals to accomplish.

Adults have daily, monthly, or yearly goals for their job which may not be in alignment with their additional career goals. Athletes have intense levels of goal achievement and mindset work. Others may have spiritual or emotional goals. You might also have social, educational or even comfort goals, for instance, you want to purchase your own car or house or you want to start a family or gain independence. This list of goals can go on ad infinitum, but you have gotten the point by now and I’m beginning to feel overwhelmed by just listing possible goals.

Thus, I began polling people about their goals. I recently had a conversation with an acquaintance who stated their goal for 2024 was to add days to their family vacation. And then I sat there waiting in silence until it became uncomfortable, and I realized that was all they were going to say. I found myself in awe. I did not know what to say or how to respond as my mind whirled out of control with the list of goals I had set just because it’s TODAY and tomorrow isn’t promised!

My mind thought of my weightlifting, cardio, yoga, nutrition and meditation goals, the stack of books I plan to read, the podcast episodes and blog articles I want to do, the networking organizations and business researching, and any new certifications I think will benefit myself or my staff. Every year I want to see an increase in business profits. This breaks down to clients, social media and marketing goals, community outreach, pro-bono work.

As a member of my religion’s clergy, I have personal spiritual preparation and educational goals. Then there are relationships, family, and travel goals. And, underlying it all, my goal is to just handle what I’ve got scheduled and NOT take on any other GOALS!!!

I realized making New Year’s Goals is passe when I attended a business networking group recently, the host asked, “For those of you that are still into it, raise your hand if you’ve set goals for 2024?” Only about a third of the people raised their hand.

As a 2023 volunteer service goal, I committed to hosting monthly, virtual, Death Cafe meetings. For more information go to DeathCafe, According to the Death Cafe rules for these meetings, the only requirement is not to have a plan or agenda and to simply to hold space for the conversation. These are often sacred and sincere moments where people are vulnerable and share their thoughts and experiences. That required a personal commitment to do so. I see goals as personal commitments for growth, if you are not growing and learning you are stagnating.

One of my yoga certifications is in Brain Longevity Therapy Training. One of the tenets to a healthy aging brain is to keep it active. Activities like learning new skills, reading, socializing, movement work like balance and exercise all affect the brain. The brain and body need to be challenged to keep them working at optimal levels. However, growth is often a process that occurs even during dying and all the way through death. I often look at death, not only as transition but as an initiation. Death is an unknown and it takes preparation to face it in peace. Physician-assisted suicide, or “medical aid in dying”, is legal in eleven jurisdictions, the Commonwealth of Virginia is not one of them. As a Death Doula, I have been bedside with several people as they were actively dying. Some are aware and some are not, while all these deaths were medically regarded as peaceful. I do not know that they would classify as a “good death” if it were my own.

Holding space for Death is a growth experience. My ultimate goal is to have a good death and all my other goals reflect that. No, I am not actively dying, I am actively living. I am acutely aware of the fact that tomorrow is not promised and that gives the simplest of moments a glamor that most people do not see.

For example, walking my very elderly dog is its own growth experience in mindfulness. We walk slowly and methodically. Her eyes are not as clear now and it is obvious she has become mostly deaf. She avoids stairs or steep hills. She demands pets from any stranger and wants to sniff any friendly dog. She takes long pauses to sniff thoroughly between bushes and under benches. I have time to notice the clarity of the stars above and watch the diamonds of frost begin to form as we stand silently on the abandoned sidewalks in the winter darkness. The sweeping mantle of cold (or possibly arthritic joints) makes her knees tremble slightly.

We slowly walk along, allowing her to go as far as she wants and where she wants, until she spontaneously turns around and heads back. Some days she stands in the doorway to our apartment looking through as if she has forgotten where she is, cautious about entering. Other days, as she sleeps long and deeply, I will hear her whimper and look over to see her feet moving slightly, clearly dreaming of running and playing with other dogs or her humans. I know time is growing shorter for her, but we will face that together. I do not ever want her to feel alone or unloved. We can never accurately predict when a natural death will occur, so you must be ready all the time. Ushering a pet is much like a person. We sit and just be with each other. Sometimes I talk but other times it is just not needed. She just wants someone to be present and touch her. So much is conveyed through touch.

Time seems to shrink for elders. One activity, like a medical appointment or meeting a friend for coffee, can be exhausting. You think you have all the time in the world to accomplish the things you want but knowing Death can come at any time can make the experiences of life taste even more sweet. I do not like to repeat experiences, travel to the same places or even eat in the same restaurants because I might miss an opportunity! When I die, I want to know I lived my life to its fullest and took every opportunity to suck the life out of every single minute. This requires commitment, planning and setting goals.

Take a minute to consider if you knew you only had one year left to live. How would you live differently? What would take importance? Do you have the cash? Make it happen. Set those goals! Say the things that need to be said! Do the things you need to do! Heal the things that need attention! Let go of the past and be present! It’s time to outgrow your comfortable life and move into the adventure of living fully so that when Death arrives you are ready to take that journey with her without hesitation or regret weighing you down.

P.S. I offer a virtual Death Cafe meeting every month, for more information google “Death Cafe of Southside Virginia” or look us up on DeathCafe.com

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