Good Life, Good Death

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My doctor, it turns out, is prone to hyperbole: the polyp was on my gall bladder, not my pancreas, and it appears benign. With the happy news of my new lease on life, I quickly forgot my medical scare and returned to the comforting distractions of life.

To deny death, some fall back on righteousness, some busy themselves with crucial tasks only the living can do, like trimming cuticles or alphabetizing the condiments in the pantry. A rare few reach peace with death and remain unconcerned by the ego's final erasure.

I'm not one of those people. Life has served me up a lot of loss -- from beloved creatures already gone, to dear friends about to go, to the terrifying thought we all share that today will be the day we get paved over by an errant city bus, and all our chances to eat Oreos, and play with our chocolate Labs, and watch inane TV, and be madly in love, and be intellectually challenged, and be free, and alive, and beautiful, will be gone. I have no idea what to do with this odd knowledge. Any prescription I might offer would be someone else's.

Death is like an unmapped land -- a place our minds can't fully comprehend, but on the perimeters of which we are summoned to both new spiritual depths and sheer terror. Maybe our only call, both for ourselves and for our culture in denial, is to acknowledge this strange tension and learn to live with it. As others have noted, intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at one time. Perhaps living an honest life means having the ability to do the same with death.

Laine Bergeson is assistant editor at Utne.

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