Death and Poetry

Lo, there do I see my mother, and my sisters, and my brother
Lo, there do I see the line of my people, back to the beginning
Lo, they do call to me, they bid me take my place among them
In the halls of Valhalla, where the brave may live...
forever

-- The Thirteenth Warrior

I haven't been very good at writing for other special issues, mainly because the topics just haven't been things that I'm very good at writing about, but death? Death I can do! In fact, it's probably my 2nd best topic for creative writing - following depression/dispair/angst/et.al. (Hey, I was goth before goth was cool. Back then, we didn't have a name for it. I was just "weird").

In high school, I took a creative writing class. We were given an assignment to write a story using the phrase "Suddenly, everything was peaceful." The day it was due, we all took turns reading our stories out loud in class. Most people wrote nice little stories about people out on a picnic with bunnies hopping nearby and how "suddenly, everything was peaceful" and they knew how great life was ::happy sigh:: Basically, they all focused on the "peaceful" aspect of the phrase.

Me? I got hung up on the "suddenly". My story - which I have since lost (which is extremely depressing, because it was really quite good), was about a soldier in a war and how hearing the screams of his fellow soldiers around him as they were dying had worn him down to a point where he simply could no longer go on. Sitting in his foxhole one day, he hears a gun fire and the familiar whine of the bullet headed his direction and he decides to stand up. It was all written from the first person, and I had a really neat little section where I described the bullet going through the guy from his point of view, and then how his throat was now letting lose that awful scream that had so haunted his soul. "Then suddenly, everything was peaceful. It was the only way out."

My teacher sent me to talk to the school counselor.

I don't know if that's how the guys in the trenches ever feel. At the time I wrote it, I was only 16. I was too young to remember anything from the coverage from Vietnam, and we hadn't yet had any kind of a significant military conflict following it. I'm not sure why I even though to write about a soldier because, in the span of my life to that point, war wasn't that much of a reality, except for the spectre of nuclear war - and with that, the only impression I had was that everyone died pretty much immediately, so warfare with guns just wasn't part of my thought process.

But death was. And it still is in many ways. On one of the Norse Pagan lists I'm on, I usually don't have a whole lot to say, but since we started discussing how we want to be buried, I've been popping in the conversation a bit more and have been looking forward to reading the messages with a bit more entheusiam than usual. My favourite kind of books are True Crime storys, which almost always involve death, and if I can't find anything else on TV, I can always sit through hours of True Crime documentaries (not that they get my whole attention - I almost always am doing something else at the same time - like writting this, for example.)

But even with all that, I can't really explain why I have such an interest in death. When it gets right down to it, I'm quite frankly terrified of the concept. Much of that has to do with the way I react to anesthesia when I've had to have surgery. Rather than just drifting off to a nice, peaceful sleep, I seem to be acutely aware that there's a passage of time going on, but that none of my senses are working. It's almost like being trapped, falling into an infinite void in which I cannot see, hear, smell, taste or feel a thing - I can only "exist" and wait for something - anything - to change. I worry that this is death will be like, except that I'll have the knowledge that the "anything" will never come, and there will never be a change. Even writing about this right now, I can feel my heart pounding faster and my throat constricting just a bit.

And yet even though that's what I fear death will be like, I still hold to my faith that after death, I won't be enveloped in a conscious state of nothingness, but that I'll be with my beloved Gods, roaming the lands of Asgard and living in Thor's great hall of Bilskirnir, dining and drinking with my ancestors and reveling in all his glory.

The challenge, then, has been to find a way to reconcile my fear with my hope, so that by the time death comes - buy the time I can see the line of my kin, calling me to take my place among them, I will be able to go with a joyful heart, and not the dread that now goes so deep that there are times I've chosen to live with more pain than might really be necessary just to avoid the brief experience of surgery.

I think humanity in general, though, has always had kind of a weird relationship with death. While we may try to deter it or even avoid it all together, death is really just one more phase in the cycle of life - and it is the one force we have absolutely no power over at all. We just go to a lot of work to try and convince ourselves otherwise.

How often have you heard a news story talk about how "researchers have found that people who do [behaviour x] have a [y] percent greater risk of death than those who don't" or "[Behaviour x] has been shown to increase the risk of early death"? People make life altering changes based on such statements, and yet the statements themselves are all but meaningless. Doing or not doing [x] won't change a thing about when you die. You may be healthier until then, and you may feel better, but even if you don't end up dying from the negative effects of [x], there's always a Mack truck handy for death to drive your way.

One part of the problem is that we seem to have decided that since we know how long the average person lives, each of us are thus supposed to be able to live that long. If we don't, then we died early. Given the "entitlement" attitude that seems to permeate so much of this country, it's really not all that surprising that we'd also decide we are "entitled" to a certain amount of life, but the Universe has made no such bargain with us. When death decides it's our time to go, there's no negotiating, no compromise, and no option to extend our lease on life.

Yet even though I understand the above sentiments all too well, when my husband and I were planning on getting married, I made him promise me that he wouldn't try skydiving until we'd been married at least 15 years. I figured by then, I'd have had a good long time with him and if he died in the process (he's a bit of a klutz, so you'll understand my lack of faith), at least I wouldn't feel quite so cheated.

It seems to be a place where my instincts - my desire to avoid experiencing death (be it my own or someone else's) runs up against my beliefs, and it's a conflict that never quite gets resolved. I fear a void, but hope for peace and joy. I know it can't be stopped, yet I want to stop it from taking someone I love and avoid taking planes unless absolutely necessary. And none of that matters. Death will do what it wants to do, and what, if any, afterlife there may be will be what it is. Yet I still keep trying to understand, and I still keep wanting to know.

Death comes in and takes what's his
Leaving sorrow in his wake
But do not fear for peace is found
In the stillness of the night.

-- Kriselda Jarnsaxa