A Pattern For the World

Ruminations on Death and Resurrection

I was eight years old the first time someone I knew died. He was a classmate of mine, another eight year old little boy. We weren’t extremely close, but we spent enough time together on the playground and the soccer field to qualify as “recess friends”.

I barely remember anything about him now other than that he loved sports like me. His normal attire was a basketball jersey over a T-shirt, with a baseball cap whose brim I always thought he kept too straight. I liked a nice round bend in my own.

One day he simply stopped showing up to school. After a week’s absence or so a kid asked our teacher where he was. “He’s sick” she replied, “and he’s not going to be coming to class for a while.”

One of the other kids must have gotten the inside scoop on his condition from a parent, because soon the news spread among us that he had something called “Loo-kee-mee-uh”. None of us knew what it meant, but we knew enough to say it in hushed tones, with grave looks on our young faces.

I don’t remember how long afterwards the news of his death reached us. A month perhaps, maybe two. Time flows differently at that age. I heard about it first through the rumor mill, maybe from the same source that had brought us news of his condition in the first place. In hindsight I’m amazed at the intelligence gathering capacity of pre-internet, pre-cell phone era school children. In any case, I heard it as a rumor first, and not long afterwards our teacher sat us down and said she had some sad news to share with us.

He had bravely fought his illness, she told us, but in the end the doctors couldn’t cure him and he had died. She told us we were going to have a memorial for him soon, and if anyone felt sad and needed someone to talk to, the school counselor was available anytime.

Over the course of the next few weeks, his name and image were everywhere. His portrait was mounted in the hallway, framed by blank white paper so people could scribble notes to him. I wondered if they believed that he could or would read these notes. Personally I doubted he’d be interested; he hadn’t particularly liked reading, and he usually had trouble sitting still during reading time.

They talked about renaming the sports field in his honor, which everyone agreed he would have loved. They held a memorial service at the school, which all the kids were taken out of class to attend. His parents were there and they cried the whole time. Seeing two adults openly weep was more shocking to me than the news of his death had been. Among the children, for the most part silence predominated. A few of the little girls cried, but they weren’t the ones who had been closest to him, and one had the feeling they didn’t cry out of sadness or loss, but because they felt it was appropriate for the situation. Maybe they just couldn’t cope with weighty and grave silence. The rest of us stayed quiet and sober and slightly confused.

There was much talk of “what he would have wanted”, and all the ways we could “keep his memory alive” and this, juxtaposed against the desperate sadness of the adults who seemed to believe he had been swallowed up by an endless void, was a source of confusion. I had no formal education about Death, but I was sure that it was less permanent than this behavior implied. Death carried us off to a different place, somewhere we couldn’t see or touch from where we now stood, but somewhere real nonetheless, where we would have new and different lives. It wasn’t a final end, how could it be? I was confident of eternal life, although it wasn’t something I’d been taught, and I hadn’t been raised in a religious home. The conception came out of pure childhood intuition, but I was sure of it.

The adults paid lip service to a similar idea: “we’ll see him again some day” they said, or “he’s looking down on us now”, and yet the depth of their despair and the awful sound of their throaty, raspy sobs suggested they didn’t really believe it. Thus my confusion. Wasn’t he really in a better place, and finally able to be at peace, free from the long suffering of his illness? If so, why were they all so sad? We should be celebrating for him!

Twenty two years later, my own father died, also of Leukemia. During the last week of his life I was at his bedside. There was no treatment for him. He had been found unconscious on the floor of his apartment, and gone straight from the ambulance to the ICU to hospice. The doctors estimated he had forty eight hours to live when I first arrived, but the tough old dog made it almost seven days before his body finally failed. I was thirty years old by then, and much had transpired since that first exposure to human frailty at eight.

My father and I spent many hours talking during that week, mostly reminiscing and sharing memories. He did a lot of apologizing. I told him all the ways he had impacted my character and how he would be with me always even after he was gone. I proposed planting a tree of his choice in lieu of a traditional grave marker. I offered to get a memorial tattoo. I said that if I ever achieved my dream of opening a library, I’d name it after him.

He was grateful, and happy to hear my ideas, and then eventually the conversation flowed on to other things. It was only long after he was gone, in reflection and hindsight, that I realized that at some point I had absorbed the same attitude towards death which had perplexed me as a child. I had taken the responsibility for producing and maintaining life after death upon myself. Somewhere in those intervening years between eight and thirty I had internalized, like the adults I saw at that memorial, the idea that death was the end, and if I wanted my father to live on, it would have to be as a memory which it was now my duty to preserve.

This instinct to preserve seems natural enough and even honorable, but in its modern manifestation it is full of darkness and despair. Beneath its honorable surface lies the horrendous belief in obliteration. We must produce memorials because our lives will not be preserved elsewhere.

Among pre-modern people who practiced what academics call “ancestor worship”, memory was also important (among such cultures, it was not uncommon for people to have their lineages memorized for dozens or even hundreds of generations into the past), but it was important not because they wanted to preserve their memories, but because they believed they remained in a living relationship with those ancestors. They were not truly dead, they were simply elsewhere. Perhaps the same elsewhere I conceived of as an eight year old child. And wherever it was, it was not so far beyond us as to be incapable of influence. The ancestors were constantly petitioned for help, comfort, advice, and guidance.

This is the healthy and sane approach towards death, typical of human beings rightly aligned. Some form of the idea was central to all of the cultures we’ve ever known until the last century. In our own tradition, we find the Catholic understanding of the Communion of Saints, a vast family of spiritual “ancestors”, alive in the glory of God, ready and willing through His power, to help those of us struggling on Earth.

Anyone who calls himself a Christian ought to leap at the possibility of joining such a glorious array, and celebrate on behalf of a loved one being given the opportunity. Not that tears for the dead are evil, but there ought, at the least, be tears of joy mingled with the tears of loss. The earliest Christians certainly thought so, as evidenced by their notorious eagerness for martyrdom.

Jonathan Pageau has described Christianity as “a description of how reality works.” Death and resurrection are not exempt from that. Jesus reminded the disciples of it by pointing out that the seed must die in order to produce fruit. With any sense, we should have known it before He came, simply by observing nature: “God’s first revelation”. Death and rebirth, winter and spring. Can we accept it?

Even we, who call ourselves Christians and constantly hold up the resurrection of a man, of The Man, as the defining moment of history and the conquest of Death, do we accept our own teaching?

To what degree has the modern view of death as a materialist obliteration leeched its way into our souls? Even we who reject it with our will and our words, have we rejected it in our souls?

How real is our fear of death? How sure are we that it is not the end.

How true is our faith that we will rise again?