Death and Life

In the spirit of several recent events - and a plethora of student papers - I'm addressing death. The death of people, the death of things, the death of relationships. (No, this has nothing to do with my own personal life.)

Phoebe S. Spinrad writes in The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage,
The human mind is afraid of Nothing.
It is at the moment of death that Everything and Nothing meet, and throughout the history of humankind, art has struggled to make them both less frightening by transmuting them into Something, a something that can be borne. (ix)

Spinrad's observation is as applicable to literal death as it is to the figurative deaths that fill our lives. When we experience loss - whether to death, to divorce, to a move - we struggle to find larger meaning or intention. We fear the absence of meaning, of purpose, of design in our lives. We want all our losses to mean something else, something other than - as Spinrad says - Nothing.

Meaning is one of the many reasons people choose to believe in religion. We want to know that our lives have a purpose. That our deaths, our tragedies, will give rise to something larger than ourselves. And sometimes, it does.

Sometimes it is a sign that we have made the wrong choice - of mate, of behavior, of job, of living place. Sometimes it means nothing more than a bad coincidence. But we don't appreciate coincidences. We don't want to think that randomness can cause us hurt and pain. We want our suffering to have greater import than just the randomized stimulation of nerves or emotions.

But we also tend to avoid confronting the possibility of this loss. We don't want to hear when a spouse is cheating, when our behavior could make us sick or injured, when we have been the cause of either our own injury or the neglect that has led to it. We don't want to know when we are at fault.

Nor do we want to know when our own prosperity, our own happiness, has come at the expense of another's pain. And yet it is something in which we participate daily. Often through ignorance, often through deliberate disavowal of our own capabilities. We are a society and a culture that enjoys shadenfreude, that takes pleasure - even humor - in the suffering (physical or psychological) of others.

It is the hypocrisy that I find despicable. The refusal to acknowledge our own animalistic nature, to reconcile ourselves as fierce and ferocious beings with our innate desire for compassion. For we are, ultimately, both compassionate and cruel. We enjoy pain, but we also enjoy its mitigation. We are healers as much as - if not more than - harmers. Ultimately, the kind of pain in which we take pleasure is the kind that passes, the kind that teaches, that makes us stronger.

We are vicious, but we are also gracious. We understand the gains to be discovered in suffering, the advantages to being the stronger, the victor. But we are also infinitely kind, infinitely considerate, infinitely compassionate. We are creatures of contradiction, and creatures whose contradictory natures make our flaws our saving graces. And in this, we find the Something for which we risk the greatest Nothing of all.