Death: An Essay by Shane Carroll

Last Friday for YMM, we used the Third Sunday of Lent readings and reflection questions from the Walking With Christ: Lent 2010 handout for our session. The question “What is my attitude towards death? How do I come to terms with the fact that my life will end one day?” particularly struck me, as I realised I had a lot to say about it particularly in light of a few small recent occurrences.

FASCINATION, VANITY, SELF-FULFILLMENT

My answer to that question comes in three parts: fascination, vanity, and a want for self-fulfillment. Fascination because, for as long as I remember first wrapping my head around the concept of death, I have always wondered how it’d feel like; what the moment your heart stops feels like; whether you’re aware of it if it happens in your sleep; what runs through your ethereal head once you know you’ve kicked the bucket; how it feels to leave your world behind; whether the afterlife is anything like we’ve imagined it to be. This is probably one of the biggest mysteries of our lifetime, due to its nature of not, in fact, happening in our lifetime, giving no one the ability to compile enough accounts of it to say for sure.

Indeed, all we have are the few accounts of individuals who have experienced momentary “clinical death”, only to be shot back to life. Nikki Sixx, bassist of Motley Crue, experienced a two-minute death after overdosing on heroin the night of December 22, 1987 (coincidentally, the night I was born). He was successfully brought back to life by paramedics, and described feeling weightless and hearing white noise, but eventually being able to view the scene as a third party before being suddenly tugged back into himself. Others have described seeing tunnels of light; some have also agreed with the third-party experience. Listening to these accounts, however, I always wonder if any are simply made up for storytelling’s sake. And there are simply too few and far-between of them to establish something for sure.

VANITY

Next, the vanity part: this is borne both of my insecurity and of my long-standing rock diva aspirations. I have been terrified for the longest time of leaving without a trace, not being remembered in a positive light. I want to publish a book, I want to move people, I want to record songs, I want to have great kids, I want to appear in newspapers and television, in small part because there is a darkness within me that is terrified of dying without a legacy; not being remembered a decade later.

SELF-FULFILLMENT

The self-fulfillment part of this has a few ties to its vanity sibling. In preparation for death, I want to ensure my life is lived with no regrets and no leftover aspirations – this includes the published book, recorded songs, and beautiful family as well. This also includes expressing anything that needs to be expressed to others before there is no further chance to. I’m still working on that. It struck me on Friday, the day after my grandfather’s brother’s funeral, that my grandfather comes from a family of 19 children. And of that 19 children, my grandfather is the only one still alive. It’s a crazy thought, because how lucky could I possibly be, right? It was a wake-up call both to just how much God looks out for me, and of the pressing need to be open about necessary feelings before it’s too late.

Two weeks ago, I overheard a conversation between my boss and some people we work with. They were discussing a recent documentary that suggested that in order to preserve the life of our planet, we should all become vegetarian so as to save our animals and, by way of cycle, the rest of life on earth. My boss shrugged it off, saying he was going to die before the world ends anyway, and so shouldn’t need to bother. My boss is a man who doesn’t believe in religion, and doesn’t want any children of his own. He therefore can’t be blamed for such a mindset, but as I listened to him I felt rather sad for him. When he dies, he will have nowhere to go, and will not be carried on by anyone living, either.

In Milan Kundera’s book, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, he calls to mind the German adage “einmal ist keinmal”, which translates to “what happened but once, might as well not have happened at all”. He suggests thus that if we have but one life, we might as well not have lived at all, that our lives and all we live through is insignificant unless we can keep being reborn after we die, so that eventually, we’d get our mistakes totally right. This insignificance is part of the unbearable lightness that he speaks of; a complete counter-theory to the heaviness of our lives as Catholics. It is interesting to note, however, that in his book he views lightness as positivity and heaviness as negativity.

And why do I think a Catholic life is a heavy one? Because it is simply not light. We know a Catholic life is not light, not insignificant, because “einmal ist keinmal” absolutely does not apply to Jesus Christ, whom we know lived and gave up His one life for the sake of all our lives after Him, and whom we model our own lives after. We know that it is not light because everything we do in our life counts towards the moment we die. The Walking With Christ Lenten handout agrees: “Instead of worrying why earthly life is imperfect and eventually ends, it is more important to concern ourselves with living life well – so that we can share eternal life with God.” It is this attitude towards death that people like Milan Kundera and my boss will never understand.

To thus answer the question of how I come to terms with the fact that my life will one day end, I do it by being as Catholic and heavy as I can, by doing my best to not allow regret, and by being “alive” (as touched on in our recent Youth Fellowship) as opposed to just living. I also do it by accepting that death is inescapable, and most importantly, by trusting that God always knows what’s best for my life and the lives of those around me.

By Shane Carroll