"I Hope You All Die Well"
Why natural death is a good thing, actually,
and why you should plan for it now, before it's too late.
by Peachy Keenan
"I hope you all die, and I mean that with all of my heart. Allow me to explain. Last month we spent our spring break visiting family, friends, and graveyards. Against the backdrop of Pope Francis’s death and funeral, my children and I paid our respects at the grave of a dear friend’s infant daughter, who tragically died on her due date last year. She was laid to rest in a rural cemetery in Tennessee, the prettiest one I’ve ever seen.
A few days after that, my mother took us to a few of the local tourist attractions: civil war battlegrounds and soldier cemeteries. It’s strange to learn that the parking lot where you left your car was the site of hours of frenzied, hand-to-hand combat featuring the gruesome point-blank bludgeoning, strangling, and stabbing of thousands of men with bayonets, rocks, sticks, and fists: 10,000 casualties in five hours of combat.
At some of the historic homes in the area that are now museums, you can take tours of family bedrooms that were turned into emergency field hospitals. Guides point out giant bloodstains visible in splatters and puddles soaked into the oak floors. One child’s bedroom has a bloody handprint on the floor, and another corner, the tour guide informs you, is particularly dark with bloodstains because “that’s where they stacked the limbs.”
Average age of a Confederate solider was 25, with some as young as 10. In the cemetery for soldiers killed in the 1864 Battle of Franklin, row after row of sometimes unnamed soldiers are grouped by state.
I am not a civil war historian, but I did read "Gone With the Wind" about 50 times as a kid, and I do enjoy learning about battles. It must be so strange to live in a state where Americans fought and died all over the place, to constantly drive by sites where many thousands died agonizing deaths and generally experienced moments I pray no in America ever witnesses again.
Maybe the battlefield monuments, and the sheer number of dead soldiers buried in the soil all over the South, serves as a visceral reminder to people to never forget what it cost to deliver the country we enjoy today, and how fragile it all is. Americanism cost many, many people absolutely everything.
The overwhelming pathos enveloping these bucolic places is so intense it makes you want to grab those long-dead Southerners and shout, “Read the room, Buford. Please, Buford. Slavery’s over, bro. It’s done. 20th century industrialization isn’t going to need your slaves: they’ve got dirt poor Americans willing to send their own five-year-olds down into coal mines for a penny a week. If you guys had just freed them all, you’d have survived with your lives, and your nice houses would not have gotten wrecked so it badly.”
Sigh. The main thing you learn from visiting a civil war cemetery is war: what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. But people like learning things the hard way, over and over again.
Don’t Fear the Reaper Too Much: While I am a big fan of natural death, I am fanatically opposed to unnatural deaths in all their forms: tragic accidents, war, avoidable diseases, drug overdoses, drownings, murder, suicide, abortion, and so on. These are stupid, needless, wasteful deaths that fill me with grief and anger.
But natural deaths, the unavoidable kind, the kind that come with old age (if you are very fortunate), or unavoidable illness, or the tragic circumstances that produce stillborn babies, are not necessarily terrible things. They are the price we are forced to pay to draw breath, to touch grass, to feel love. To have babies. It’s a steep price, sometimes unbearably so, but not a person alive would say no to taking the deal.
Natural death does not have a place in the modern world, however; allowing nature to take its course is almost a quaint ideal in light of the widespread acceptance of planned suicides. Most deaths we encounter come in the form of horrific news stories: wars, bombs, terrorism, car crashes. But I struggle to deal with it. After all, I live in stark terror of death. I’m an old-fashioned hypochondriac and chronic worrier. I sometimes can’t sleep thinking about the close calls and near misses I’ve personally experienced. If I’d stepped off the curb one second earlier. If I hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. If that shark that came up to me while I was boogie boarding had been a little bit hungrier. If I hadn’t been standing in the pool and felt my little brother scratch my leg as he was drowning on the bottom. And maybe a few others I’ll never know about. I used to fly from L.A. to New York a lot in my mid-twenties to see friends, but I wasn’t flying on 9/11.
150,000 people a day die worldwide. 9,000 in the United States. One day it will be my day. God willing, not this day! Please, no time soon, if possible! I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid. But it is a good thing to think about your own end, from time to time. To have a chance to think ahead. To ponder how this will all end much sooner than you wish it would.
The person who can use the constant foreknowledge of their own death to make each day sweeter, and to somehow not dwell on the doom, has cracked the code to happiness.
Take My Life, Please: I deeply object to the concept of immortality, or unnatural long life. Aragorn had mixed feelings about being one of the Dúnedain. I don’t like the idea of spending all my time on a futile attempt to extend my life by a few extra years.
"The Twilight Zone" had a great episode set in the future when they are selling immortality, and an old couple can only afford it for one of them. The wizened husband gets it and he is transformed into a strong, virile young man again. He is absolutely thrilled…until he realizes he is married to an ancient old woman.
Immortality sounds great until you realize you don’t just need it for yourself. You need everyone you care about to become immortal too, or you will watch everyone you know and love get old and die, over and over again.
The “Don’t Die” biohacker movement has some excellent ideas for general health and longevity, like don’t eat at night (or after 12 pm), take vitamins, and get good sleep. Yes, I would like to do all of this and live to 110! But their campaign isn’t just about maximizing your natural life span with good health. It is literally about not dying: “We are a community united in defeating all causes of human and planetary death and building all promoters of prosperity.”
But “don’t die” is a campaign doomed to fail, and overpromise. Only one man who ever lived didn’t really die, after all. 100% of us humans will in fact die, hopefully after a long and healthy life that saw at least a few of our dreams come true.
A better and healthier message would be “Die Well.” Die with your family still speaking to you and each other. Die holding the hand of someone who loves you. Die in a state of grace and after completing all the sacraments. Die confident in the possibility of true eternal life. Die with dignity, not in a suicide pod, or scared and alone in a nursing home (the fate of all too many). Die in peace.
One man who did seem to die well was Pope Francis. For all my feelings about how he poped, he seemed to die very well indeed. He died naturally after battling a long illness with courage and forbearance. He greeted well wishers one final time in Saint Peter’s Square, riding and waving in his little Pope Fiat. He even took time to meet Vice President Vance.
That’s a pretty good last couple days, filled with prayer and joy in the people who loved him. He left much to be desired as Pope, at least for me, but he set an excellent example with his approach to his looming demise: fearless and calm to the end.
Teenagers dying in terror and misery on a muddy battlefield have the worst of all worlds: an avoidable, unnatural, brutally traumatic death, much too early, and one that ensures their last moments of life are unspeakably awful. Losing a child to war is one of my greatest fears.
My friend who lost her precious baby in the womb is fearless and calm, a year later. She explained her thoughts in such a beautiful way that I have not stopped thinking of them since. She said everyone asks her if she mourns what now will never be, like seeing her daughter grow up, get married, have children. She said she doesn’t, because what happened was inevitable, and so the time she got with her daughter was in fact her complete life, the sum total of all that would ever be of her. Things happen; sometimes unavoidable deaths take 90 years, sometime they take nine months.
Then there are, of course, some souls on Earth who will not die, at least for a very long time. They are the children who were conceived but not gestated. Millions of frozen embryos exist in a state of perpetual limbo, alive but trapped. They are the true ambassadors for the “Don’t Die” movement; because most will never get a chance to live.
When the end comes for me (hopefully not for many decades), I just hope I remember that although I may wish it was not yet my time, it is the price I agreed to pay for a gift I tried every day to deserve.
"As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music - hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went -
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been."
Is this Robert Frost poem about standing on the edge of darkness, knowing that one day you will have to enter it - but not quite yet? To me, it is. Please pray for my friend. And may you and your children live good lives, however long they may be, and remember to die well!"
