Our entire society nowadays prepares us
from our early years for plenty of things—
graduation, marriage, career—without
any certitude that these events will
happen in our life. Isn’t it incredibly silly
not to prepare us for the only event that
is absolutely guaranteed? Because having
been born, it is inevitable that we shall die one of these days.
Is death still a taboo? Articles and books about death and
dying pop up quite often; allowing us to hope that death is less
a taboo than in the past. However, from a linguistic point of
view, it would seem this is not the case. In order for linguists
to measure the strength of a taboo, they notice the number of
expressions that a language creates to avoid saying the proper
word.
Aren’t the dead often called “beloveds” or “loved ones?”
Isn’t the morgue referred to as a “funeral home?” When you
arrange for your funeral, isn’t it called a “pre-need?” Isn’t the
coffin nowadays called a “casket,” closed or open according
to your preferences? And isn’t “mortician”—a name that
contains the Latin root mors (death)—currently replaced by
“funeral director?” Aren’t “memorial parks” and “gardens of
remembrance” replacing cemeteries and graveyards?
One might wonder whether North Americans really “die”....
They pass away, are gone, leave us, their candle has been blown
out, they off themselves or even push up daisies, go west, kick
the bucket, taken the big vacation; but it seems they never die.
Once it’s done (oops, again an expression to avoid death!!) they
lie/sleep or rest, according to the grave inscriptions. Even the
way they die seems to be subjected to this kind of linguistic
euphemism: I heard he OD’d (he died from a drug overdose) as
well as his heart gave out.
As with most populations, North Americans tend towards
the “gradual suppression of direct reference to death” and it
is interesting to note these other ways of saying “it” tend to conventionalize very quickly, and turn into mere clichés; losing
their motivation and becoming quasi-synonymous and quasitransparent
terms, as noted by Enright : “On other occasions we
use euphemism unconsciously—it might be the only acceptable
term, or the term that everyone uses, and we therefore employ
it without thinking.”
If we delete dying from our everyday language, we delete
it from our mind. But we cannot delete it from the destiny of
human beings.
How to prepare?
Faced with death, we behave like children: we hide our face
behind our hands and believe she won’t see us because we do
not look at her.
“Prepare yourself for death” is an old commandment,
inherent in so many traditions on this planet. There are
numerous paths to choose from in order to actually deal
with our mortality, ranging from dream yoga (Tibetan, Indian
and Mexica traditions); to the phowa or Transference of
consciousness (Tibetan tradition); to a number of prayers like
“Great God, prostrate before Thee, I accept and adore that
sentence of death which Thou hast pronounced over me,” by
St. Joseph Cafasso; or the Mexican Day of the Dead festival,
that use to take as long as 60 days in the ancient times: “This
was the time when they would talk about the ‘great’ death and
how to prepare for it; the time when contact was established
with dead ancestors, warriors and sages who had crossed the
threshold, or had simply come back to life in a different guise,
in a different form of existence; and so, instead of fearing death,
the Mexicas would make collective preparations for it.”
But the simplest one is:
First, to allow our language to remind us of death by avoiding any linguistic euphemisms.
Second, to observe impermanence in everything. It won’t
make us sadder. Exactly the opposite: we will be able to
place events at the right context and if, supposing, someone
scrapes our car we shall probably be of the opinion of my
father (he was a wise man!): “There still will be cars around
when we’re not here anymore.” In ancient Rome, any
general coming back from victory in the day of his Triumph
was ritually told “memento mori”(“remember that you
have to die”) by a humble servant and later on, the same
phrase became a whole training in the mouth of the Trappist
monks, a silent order in which one was not allowed to say
anything else. The phrase was used while digging their
grave a little bit every day. I’m sure you agree with me that
such hard discipline may not be so easy for us to practice
nowadays, but that my father’s attitude can make things less
stressful. It will bring us less attachment to things and even
to people. This mindset led my father to discover how love
and attachment are often mixed up in our life and he used a
gesture to explain the difference: try to squeeze some water
in your fist and you will lose it. This is attachment. Then, turn
your palm up, keep your hand open, let the water be free to
stay or go, and it will remain with you. This is love.
Third, free yourself of hopes and fears, as they are both forms
of attachment to things or persons or ideas. Whatever life
offers, instead of judging it and starting to hope or fear, start
from the thing itself, good or bad, and make the best out of
it, and not for only yourself but for everyone else. A win-win
style of life, authentically generous and altruistic, is another
way to live fully and to be able, at the end of your days, to
have the same attitude in the face of this event called death!
Fourth, instead of feeling anguished about “what happens
after,” especially if you have no religious or spiritual
references, just reflect that all phenomena—and you are one
of those—collapse from the quantum field. They appear for
a time in which they continuously change, and disappear
when the innumerable strengths that keep them changing
include a major change. They are still part of the quantum
field. They can again collapse in different forms, sure, under
the influence of different causes and conditions. But right
now, you are among the causes and the conditions, as you
can inform the quantum field. So, why not enrich it with
plenty of favorable, good, altruistic information? We do not
know how and when, but causes always tend to mature once
the conditions are given for this to happen. Does this remind
you of the idea of karma? Correct. This is how a Western,
modern brain would explain it!
Daniela Muggia is an Italian thanatologist co-author of The
Impact of Empathy—A New Approach to Working with ADHD
Children and the winner of the prestigious Terzani Award for
the Medical Humanities. For almost 30 years she studied the
Tibetan tradition of death and dying with Sogyal Rinpoche,
author of the groundbreaking Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
She also trained with Cesare Boni at Naples University, Italy.
After more than 20 years of working with the terminally ill, she
has developed the ECEL method, Empathic Care at the End
of Life; one of the most popular courses taught in hospitals,
hospices and for Masters degree programs at universities in
Italy and other countries. The Impact of Empathy was published
in October of 2014. www.BlossomingBooks.com and can be
purchased through Amazon.com or your local bookstore and also by phone: 1 (800) 247-6553.
Readers may contact the author on her book’s Facebook
page: https://www.facebook.com/ImpactOfEmpathy where
additional articles and interviews are posted, as well as on her
Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/Daniela Muggia).