Tied to Everything Everywhere

Long life is valued in our culture, perhaps in all cultures. With baby boomers reaching their elder years, TV commercials are full of life-extending and health-improving products, so many of them that it can make you dizzy. It can also make you long for simpler days when you just lived a good life and then died when your body gave out. Today it’s more complicated. Extending life is a science and a business. As an older person myself, I am very aware of the various ways in which my own body has lost some of its resilience and now needs the various medications I take each morning. And I’m more aware of the various practices, drugs and foods that are probably something to incorporate in my life if I’m going to remain relatively healthy. Somehow however, this preoccupation with health-enriching products only makes us more aware of the opposite end of that spectrum: that we will all die someday and the older we are, the sooner it will be. Rather than accepting that truth, our aim is to avoid death as long as we can. It’s kind of a fear-based mentality. I got a fresh perspective on this whole issue of life and death this week when my pet cat, Shadow, died. She’d been with me for 19 years, was part of my close family. And yet she had not been influenced with our cultural attitudes about death. She didn’t fight it. Sitting with her for her last few days, and standing with her at the vet’s office when she took her last breath, I was given a new perspective on death.

It was clear for a couple weeks that Shadow was on her way out. I wanted to spare her the trauma of getting in the cat carrier and riding to the vet’s office. But I finally decided to take her in to be checked over. She looked like she was dying, but what did I know for certain?  Shadow knows our vet. She and I  trade massages for cat care, so she is a familiar person in our household. And at the vet’s office, we also had my cousin Kendra who also works there. While Dr. Duster was examining Shadow and finding that her heart was beating wildly and her breath not sufficient to sustain her, several of us were standing around the table, petting and stroking Shadow, appreciating her shiny black coat, her sweet nature, her long life, telling her in soft voices how we supported her. When she breathed her last breath, of course there was sadness, but also a peacefulness and beauty. Life and death for Shadow felt like a wholesome, natural thing, part of the cycle that we are all part of. It was not tragic. 

It occurs to me that perhaps the reason we humans struggle with the eventuality of personal death is because we as a species have put ourselves above the rest of creation. We think of ourselves as the rulers or the primary life forms, surrounded by relatively unimportant other planetary life. It’s a bit of a lonely place to be. Not only are we psychologically and spiritually removed from the great cosmic fabric of life on earth, but at least in this culture, we put high worth on individuality. This leaves us standing alone as we think about our end. If we instead let ourselves be just another life form, how different might that be for us as a species. We’d be surrounded by a whole universe of living neighbors, plants, animals, birds, microorganisms. That place in a neighborhood of other people as well as other life forms has the potential of making us feel much more comfortable, more aware of the cycles of life around us, more aware that even though individuals come and go, we are part of something much greater that doesn’t disappear. We are part of a whole!

So Shadow’s passing from this life to whatever comes next has given me some perspective and some new peace. I’m grateful for that. I did some research on life and death in order to expand on the wider phenomenon as I wrote this post, but I didn’t really find anything that seemed relevant. I guess the learning I had was more personal than the life cycle of different plants and animals, or the way we humans commemorate dying. My experience was more a felt thing, a reassuring reminder that no matter how we sometimes feel alone or afraid, we are part of a wholeness so much greater than ourselves, and when we die, we return to that wholeness. As Shadow has. As everyone who has died has already done. 

I am sitting in the Boston airport, waiting for my flight home, and to be prudent I should wait to post this until I’ve had time to review it. But what the heck, I’ll just post it now. Why not? And as I fly over the vast country from here to Iowa, I’ll be thinking about the whole, of which our airplane load is a tiny part. Cheers to you in your own tiny neighborhood, which incredibly is connected to everything everywhere…..