Our fear of loosing and endings seems sometimes all pervading. Talking with a friend recently, whose day job is with a large cancer charity, we were discussing how scientific research is presented. How often do we hear that this food, or that activity, can reduce the risk of cancer? I gather that all these headlines are a gloss on a more complex and unpalatable truth. The longer we live, and the more we avoid or cure other diseases that used to bump us off around the three score and ten mark, the more and more likely it becomes that we will get cancer eventually. Those virtuous foods and activities won't prevent cancer, though they may postpone it.
We all, in the end, have to die of something. But somehow we seem collectively to be hell bent on trying to avoid this fact.
With cancer, healthy eating, living or sheer good luck may allow us to postpone cancer, or maybe, just maybe, avoid it altogether. But if you do avoid it, what will you die of?
With death, in truth, we can do no more that somewhat postpone the inevitable. There is no outside chance, no hope against hope, opportunity to win against death if only we avoid cancer or other dread diseases long enough. Death is not an if, but a when.
And yet we expend a great deal of our individual and collective energy trying to avoid the idea of death, and delay the fact of it.
It seems to me that fear of or running from the inevitability of death is the cause of a lot of ills in our society. From our pensions deficit to health care funding, at the root of many of these problems is an enormous and unmentionable discussion about death. That death will happen to each of us is still inevitable, but uniquely in the history of human beings we are moving into a time when we can control or postpone many of its causes, at least for a time.
This seemed like an unquestionably good thing in theory, but in practice it is creating big problems and difficult questions. For example, what are the financial consequences of people who have been retired and drawing pensions longer than they have been working (arguably at the root of our current pensions crisis)? How much should be spent on interventionist health care for an 90 year old in failing health? As death approaches there are all manor of complex interventions we could do for them. Can we? Should we? At what cost? Can we afford it? Is it spiritually or financially beneficial, for them, for us?
Behind all these questions is another, larger, one: Why at the moment do we go to such great lengths to avoid death, both the idea and the fact?
Why do we fear so deeply the only certainty in our lives? Can it really be simply because we are afraid? In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien frames mortality, death, as the `gift to men'.
Certainly it seems to me, if you stop to consider it, that the alternative, immortality, would be something of a curse - to be stuck forever in this world, even after you have long since tired of it.
Death, the fact that life is short, is what gives our lives meaning and purpose. All this will pass, so we better had make the most of it.
Tibetan Buddhism exhorts us to live life in the mirror of death - that the fact of death should be present at all times, and should pertain to everything we do.
This may see morbid, but think of the alternative - as Sogyal Rinpoche says `I often think of the words of the great Buddhist master Padmasambhava "Those who believe they have plenty of time get ready only at the time of death. Then they are ravaged by regret. But isn't it far too late?" What more chilling commentary on the modern world can there be than that most people die unprepared for death, as they have lived, unprepared for life?'
Accepting and contemplating the inevitable fact of death, rather than avoiding the idea and postponing the fact, can become a comfort, allowing us to make the most of the life we do have and transcending regret. If this is true for individuals, surely it is also true for our society and government. While we grapple with ever spiraling health and pension care issues, is it time to talk about the potential for support and comfort in illness, old age and eventually death, rather than prolonging and postponing the inevitable?
