Death - Shifting Images



This article was written by Zentai from the series: "Beyond the 12 Steps" at the Circle for Recovery. It is not posted there yet, but will be soon.

It seems as we age, the word "Death" seems to come up more often. This article seems to explain why to some extent.

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I have found a mourning process for oneself as one gets older or deteriorating health conditions exists and one must come to terms with change resulting from this unavoidable progressing. One might describe this process as mourning for former states of the self, as if these states represented lost objects. - G. Pollock

We will mourn the loss of others. But we are also going to mourn the loss of ourselves - of earlier definitions that our images of self depend upon. For the changes in our body redefine us. The ways that others perceive us redefine us. And at several points in our life we will have to relinquish a former self-image and move on. In the course of these changes we move from baby to kid to adolescent and then into stages of adult life: Breaking away from the pre-adult world between ages seventeen and twenty-two. Making, during our twenties, our first commitment to a job, a lifestyle, a marriage. Revising our selections in our late twenties and early thirties to add what is missing, to modify and exclude. Settling down and investing ourselves , during most of our thirties, in work, friends, family, community, whatever. And reaching, at about forty, those bridging years which take us from early to middle adulthood. For many of us it's a crisis. Some of us are also faced, regardless of age, with a terminal or serious health condition that limits our life both in terms of longevity and quality of life.

There are those who insist on speaking in a doggedly upbeat way of this time of our life when our skin and our marriage are fading, when a number of youthful dreams have gone down the drain and when - although in our heart of hearts, we're only seventeen - the rest of us is slowly sagging southward. We may attempt to tell ourselves that we haven't changed but this is difficult to do. We feel shaken. We feel scared; We do not feel safe. The center's not holding, and things are falling apart. All of a sudden our friends, if not us, are having affairs, divorces, heart attacks, cancer. Some of our friends - men and women our age - have died. As we acquire new aches and pains, our health care is, of necessity, being supplied by internists, cardiologist, dermatologist, podiatrists, urologists, periodontists, gynecologists and clinical therapists, from all of whom we want a second opinion. We want a second opinion that says, Don't worry, you are going to live forever. We may move on easily. Reunification of what has been inexorably outlived is by definition affirmative and we let go of youth's acute, hopeful excitement for the richness of sensibility, the easy exercise of nurturing strength, that middle age carries, we rarely let go without some sort of a struggle. Faced with the losses that mid-life has already brought, or is soon to bring, faced with a sense of finiteness and mortality, few of us will renounce our youth or health with anticipation of gain. And many of us will fight it all the way. I'm speaking generally, of course. In my personal beliefs - life and death are the same.

It's hard for the soul to sing as it gets older. The angst of mid-life seems, in restrospect, a breeze. Shoved or eased into age, we ruefully learn that fifty was nifty and that those who died at sixty died to young. And then we learn that even though we have a song or two to be sung before all the lights go out, the coming of age has brought us to the final scenes of the play - and death waits in the wings. Old age or deteriorating health brings many losses; we shall hear from those who fail against these losses. But there is another, more hopeful point of view. It argues that if we truly mourn the losses of old age or health, mourning can liberate us, can lead us through to creative freedoms, further development, joy and the ability to embrace life. We cannot discuss old age as if it were a single entity, a sickness, a termination, a wait for the end.

For although mandatory retirement and Medicare and Social Security payments and senior-citizen discounts at the movies may technically mark the onset of old age, experiences of significant loss related to our aging may not occur until many years later. Indeed, students of aging now tend to subdivide old age into the "young old" (65-75), the "middle old" (75-85) and the "old old" (85 to whatever), recognizing that each of these groups has different problems and needs and capabilities. They also recognize that while good health and good friends and good luck - and a good income - certainly make aging easier to take, it is our attitude toward our losses as much as the nature of our losses which will determine the quality of our old age. It is easier to grow old if we are neither bored nor boring, if we have people and projects we care about, if we are open and flexible and mature enough to submit - when we need to submit - to immutable losses. The process, begun in infancy, of loving and letting go can help prepare us for these final losses. But stripped - as age does strip us - of some of what we love in ourselves, we may find that a good old age demands a capacity for what is called "ego transcendence." Facing a terminal or serious life-threatening health condition presents many of the same issues as growing older. And often much younger in years, but facing the same issues as those faced with increasing age.

Our earlier life history is important in determining our capacity to change and grow in old age. But age or health condition itself may also call forth new strengths and new capabilities that weren't available at previous stages. There may be more wisdom, more freedom, more perspective and more toughness. There may be more candors with others, more honesty. There also may be a shift in the way we perceive the hard times in our life - a shift from "tragedy" to "irony." By tragedy I mean a perception that leaves no room for other possibilities. Tragedy is all-encompassing and all black. There is no yesterday. There is no tomorrow. There is no hope. There is no consolation. There is only absolutely rotten, totally irreparable now. Irony sees the same event written a little smaller. Its blackness doesn't fill the entire screen. Irony offers a context in which we are able to tell ourselves that things could be worse. It also offers a context in which we even might imagine that things could get better. This shift in perception from tragedy to irony may be the special gift of our later years or current health condition, helping us to deal with our accumulating losses and sometimes also helping us to grow. With flexibility and perhaps a touch of irony, we can continue to change and grow in old age. Psychology can ease the emotional problems that the coming of age may initiate or intensify; anxiety, hypochondria, paranoia and - most prevalent - depression. But in addition to the relief that psychotherapy can provide, psychological work with the old can effect sweeping change, bringing vital transformations through a process called "mourning-liberation." Therapists report that psychoanalysis with the elderly has helped their patients retrieve their sense of self-worth; has helped them to forgive themselves and others; has helped them find new adaptations when old age has rendered their past adaptations unworkable. It is true that in dying and death - whatever the dying is like, whatever the death means - we come face-to-face with the ultimate separation.

Perhaps we can only look at death when death does not mean the end of everything that we are. Perhaps we can only do so if we are able to set our own death within some context of after-death continuity. Indeed, it has been argued that there is - in most of us - a need for connections that last beyond our own lifetime, a need to feel that our finite self is part of a larger something that endures. There are various contexts, in which we may experience, or struggle toward, this connection. And each of these contexts can offer us an image of what it seems fair to call immortality.

Our most familiar image of immortality is religious, with an indestructible soul and a life after death, with the promise that our last separation will lead to eternal reunion, with the assurance that all will not be lost, but found. However not every religion rests its case on a literal afterlife or an immortal soul. With some spiritual practices it is an experience of a sense of connection with a spiritual Power derived from a more-than-natural source. A power in which we share and which protects us. A power through which we may be reborn - spiritually, symbolically - into a realm of "death-transcending truths. Freud argued that religious beliefs are illusions built up by man to make his helplessness in this world endurable. He says we create religion to "exorcise the terrors of nature and to make up for the sufferings civilization imposes and that we use religion to reconcile ourselves to fate's cruelty, particularly as it is shown in death." (I suggest that Freud should be taken with tongue in cheek in many areas. He was somewhat wacko in some things, but he was the father of modern psychology, so I'll give him some credit.) In Zen teachings final death hopefully brings about the end of the cycles of death and rebirth - of biological and psychic annihilation, the end of suffering and then can move on to Nirvana - a state of total enlightenment in spirit - and agrees that death of the cycles does not therefore have to mean the absolute end. There are other ways of imagining how some part of us might endure - beyond our death, beyond annihilation. There are other ways of imagining immortalization connections and continuities. Living on through nature or as ancestors, for instance (as in Tao and Shinto) - through oceans, mountains, trees, recurring seasons - serves some of us as an image of immortality. We die, but the earth goes on and on. For others among us, immortality resides in those works and acts which have some impact on future generations - in the causes we fight (sometimes die) for, in the discoveries we make, in what we construct or teach or invent or create.

Our existence is finite. The self that we have created through so many years of effort and suffering will die. And sustained though we may be by the idea, the hope, the certainty that some portion of us will eternally endure, we also must acknowledge that this "I" who breathes and loves and works and knows itself will be forever and ever and ever - obliterated. So whether or not we live with images of continuity - of immortality - we also will have to live with a sense of transience, aware that no matter how passionately we love whatever we love, we don't have the power to make either it, or us, stay.