Into the Blue: EA, This Time in Death

EA, THIS TIME IN DEATH

In January 2021, I wrote an Into the Blue entry titled EARTH; I shared with you, how over the years, I have developed a quirky affinity towards EA words--when EA shows up, my senses heighten, I pay attention. I included a list of some of my favorite EA words. Many of you responded, reminding me of words I forgot to include: sea, sweat, ocean, heart... But none of us mentioned death.

September brought death front and center. We lost a family friend, unexpectedly and tragically. Not on purpose, I read Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air and Elizabeth Alexander's The Light of the World: two memoirs about dying from cancer at 37 and losing a husband to a heart attack at 50. (Books land in our hands at just the right time, providing insight and clarity to questions we don't even know we're asking.)

I'll never forget what one friend said to his wife, right here in this room where I'm writing, about six years ago, when she lamented over a recent prognosis of our mutual friend, who is no longer with us: "We have to make room for death," he told her, rather cooly. His words struck deep; I have since carried them with me as practical advice to aspire to.

When Pip and Phoebe were small, I taught a weekend training at Kripalu in Western Massachusetts. Before I returned home, I went to the gift shop to find something to bring to my little ones. While the woman behind the counter wrapped up two small-sized drums, I picked up a deck of tarot cards. I drew a card. To my horror, I chose the grim reaper, a skeleton wielding a sickle surrounded by dead and dying people, and he was riding his horse right across my palm. I nearly dropped the deck. My heart raced, I began to sweat, my breath shortened. Did anyone see that? I carefully replaced the deck of cards. Head down, I grabbed the newly wrapped packages, ran to my car, and sped home to my family.

Kalanithi, the late neurosurgeon diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at 36, called out that young mother speeding across Route 90, magically thinking she could outrun the grim reaper when he wrote: "Death comes for all of us. It is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death — it’s something that happens to you and those around you." There it is again- the undeniable, unavoidable fact: death is coming for each one of us.

So how do we make room for death? We talk about it, write about it, wonder about it...and we do so without magically fearing this will alert the grim reaper of where to come next. And, most importantly, when someone dies, we walk right into the house they left, and we hold those who are still here.

Our friend's now widow asked me to bring OJ, "without the pulp," she said. "Of course, I'll be right there," I replied into the phone, grateful to have specific directions. OJ in hand, I entered the house, looking around for evidence of the grim reaper's recent visit. Nothing...except for voices coming from the kitchen. I immediately thought about the African American spiritual Alexander quotes in her memoir: “I been in sorrow’s kitchen and done licked out all the pots. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Steal away to Jesus. I ain’t got long to stay here.” I took a deep breath, and walked through the kitchen door.

I embraced our friend and her now fatherless sons--their grief was electric. I stood my ground as it coursed through my body. I put the OJ in the fridge, and took a seat at the kitchen table where we formed a circle around our grieving friend. Every few minutes, mid-sentence, another wave of grief would come over her. We would pause, rub her back or hold her hand, remind her to breathe, and wait for the wave to subside. I thought of the contractions that seized my own body in the long hours before Pip and Phoebe were born. Of course, we must labor death in the same way we labor birth.

The body arrives in love, and the body leaves in love. Alexander writes, "Loss is not felt in the absence of love." At first, I read this as a reminder that we only feel loss when we have loved; but upon reading it again, I see the table in our friend's kitchen, and understand that love isn't just the precursor to loss, it is what surrounds us in times of loss.

In a 1923 letter, 48-year-old Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke urges us to redefine our relationship to death:

"The great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves."

He adds,

"I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life’s other half) in our love. This is what actually happens in the great expansiveness of love, which cannot be stopped or constricted. It is only because we exclude it that death becomes more and more foreign to us and, ultimately, our enemy."

Perhaps it's time I add death to my list of meaningful EA words.

As always, thank you for reading.