Death Whispers

Intimations of mortality at the Chicago Health Club.

According to Greek mythology, all people on Earth once knew their exact day of death. They all lived with a deep sense of melancholy, for mortality hung like a sword suspended above them. All that changed when Prometheus introduced the gift of fire. New possibilities opened up: now humans could reach beyond themselves to control their destinies. They could strive to be like the gods. As one result, people gradually lost the knowledge of their death day.

Have we lost more? Have we lost, in fact, the sense that we will die at all? Some authors, such as Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death, argue as much. According to Becker, we fill our lives with busyness to avoid thinking about death.

Yet behind the noise of daily life can still be heard rumors we wish to deny. The whispers of death persist. I have heard those whispers, I believe, in three dissimilar places: in a health club, a political action group, and a hospital therapy group. I have even detected the overtones—but only overtones—of theology at each place.

A Temple For The Body

I joined the Chicago Health Club after a foot injury forced me to find exercise other than running. It took a while to adjust to the club’s artificiality. Patrons line up to use high-tech rowing machines, complete with video screen and an animated pace boat, though a real lake requiring real oars lies empty just four blocks away. For others, complex treadmill machines will duplicate the act of climbing stairs—this in a dense patch of high-rise buildings. And I marvel at the technology that adds computer-programmed excitement to the everyday feat of bicycling.

I marvel, too, at the human bodies using these machines: the gorgeous women in black and hot-pink leotards, and the huge hunks of masculinity clustered around the weight machines. Walls are sheathed in mirrored glass, and if you look to them you will see dozens of eyes checking out the results of the sweating and grunting, both on themselves and their neighbors.

The health club is a modern temple, complete with initiation rites and elaborate rituals, its objects of worship on constant display. I detect theology there, for such devotion to the human form is evidence for the genius of a Creator who designed it. The human person is worth preserving. And yet, in the end, the health club stands as a pagan temple. Its members strive to preserve only one part of the person: the body, which is the least enduring part of all.

Ernest Becker wrote his book and died before the exercise craze gripped America, but I imagine he would see in health clubs a blatant symptom of death denial. Health clubs, along with cosmetic surgery, baldness retardants, skin creams, and the proliferation of sports and dieting magazines, help direct our attention away from death toward life: life in this body. And if we all strive together to preserve our bodies, perhaps one day science will conquer mortality and permit us to live forever, like Gulliver’s toothless, hairless, memoryless race of Struldbruggs.

Once, as I was pedaling away on a computerized bicycle, a scene from the novel Watership Down came to mind. In the book, a colony of wild rabbits is uprooted by a construction project. As they wander, they come across a new breed of rabbits: huge, healthy, and beautiful. Their bodies show no signs of scar or struggle.

How do you live so well? the wild rabbits ask. Don’t you forage for food? The tame rabbits explain that someone provides food for them—carrots and apples, corn and kale. Life is grand.

The wild rabbits are impressed, but suspicious. After a few days they notice that one of the fattest and sleekest tame rabbits has disappeared. Oh, that happens occasionally, the tame rabbits explain. We don’t understand it. But neither do we let it interfere with our lives. There’s too much to enjoy.

Eventually, the wild rabbits stumble across a trap with a concealed noose hanging above it. The tame rabbits, in their comfortable lives, had failed to take account of one fact: the imminent danger of death.

Watership Down is a fable, of course. Presumably, animals do not contemplate their deaths; Kierkegaard considered the knowledge of one’s own death as the fact that essentially distinguishes us from the animals. But as I looked around the exercise room, I wondered just how distinguished from the animals we modern humans are. The frenzied activity I was participating in at that moment—was that merely one more way of denying death? As a nation, do we grow sleek and healthy so that we do not have to think of the day our muscular bodies will be, not pumping iron, but resting supine in a casket?

Martin Luther told his followers, “Even in the best of health we should have death always before our eyes [so that] we will not expect to remain on this earth forever, but will have one foot in the air, so to speak.” His words seem quaint in a day when most of us spend our days thinking about everything but death. Even the church focuses mainly on the good that faith can offer now: physical health, inner peace, financial security, a stable marriage. Could the emergence of prosperity theology, in fact, represent one more symptom of our culture’s frantic flight from death?

Physical training is of some value, Paul advised Timothy, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come (1 Tim. 4:8). As I pedaled, straining against computer-generated hills, I had to ask myself: What is my spiritual counterpart to the Chicago Health Club? And then, more troubling: How much time and energy do I devote to each?

Human Rights Without A Soul

For two years I attended local chapter meetings of Amnesty International. There I met good, serious people: students and executives and professionals who gather because they find it intolerable blithely to go on with life while others are being tortured and killed.

Amnesty International’s local chapters use an absurdly simple technique to combat violence: they write letters. Our group adopted three prisoners of conscience: Jorge, a union leader for employees of the Coca-Cola Company in Chile, and Ahmad of Pakistan and Joseph of Poland, both serving long-term sentences for “unpatriotic activity.” Each week we would discuss their fates and report on letters we had written to officials in their countries.

As we sat in a comfortable townhouse eating brownies and fresh vegetables, we tried to envision how Jorge, Ahmad, and Joseph spent their days and evenings. Letters from their families gave us agonizing insight into their hardships. Despite our efforts to resist it, most of the time a vague feeling of powerlessness pervaded the room. We had received no word from Jorge in two years, and Chilean officials no longer answered our letters. Most likely, he had joined “the disappeared.”

The tone of earnest concern in the group reminded me of prayer meetings I had attended. Those, too, focused on specific human needs. But at Amnesty International, no one dared pray, a fact that added to the sense of helplessness. Although the organization was founded on Christian principles, any trace of sectarianism has disappeared.

Here is a strange thing, I thought. A worthy organization exists for the sole purpose of keeping people alive. Thousands of bright, dedicated people congregate around that goal. And yet one question is never addressed: Why should we keep people alive?

I have asked that question of Amnesty International staff members, provoking a response of quiet horror. The very phrasing of the question seemed heretical. Why keep people alive? The answer is self-evident. Life is good; death is bad.

Yet, ironically, Amnesty International came about because not all people in history see those equations as self-evident. To Hitler, to Stalin, or Pinochet, death can be a good if it helps accomplish other goals. No ultimate value attaches to any one human life.

Amnesty International reveals its Christian origins by recognizing the inherent worth of every human being. Unlike, say, the Chicago Health Club, AI does not elevate beautiful specimens of perfect health: the objects of our attention were mostly bruised, with missing teeth and unkempt hair, and signs of malnutrition. But why care about such people? Is it possible to honor the image of God in a human being if there is no God?

To raise such questions at an Amnesty International meeting is to invite a period of stern and awkward silence. Explanations may follow. “This is not a religious organization.… We cannot deal with such sectarian views.… People have differing opinions.… The important issue is the fate of our prisoners.…”

Three centuries ago, French mathematician Blaise Pascal contemplated some friends who seemed to be avoiding the most important questions of life. Here is how he characterized them:

I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everything.… All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least is this very death which I cannot escape.

As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go. I know only that, in leaving this world, I fall forever either into annihilation or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing to which of these two states I shall be forever assigned. Such is my state, full of weakness and uncertainty. And from all this I conclude that I ought to spend all the days of my life without caring to inquire into what must happen to me. Perhaps I might find some solution to my doubts, but I will not take the trouble, nor take a step to seek it.

Pascal shook his head in perplexity over people who concerned themselves with trifles or even with important matters, all the while ignoring the most important matter of all.

In our strange society, it seems that the questions most worth asking are the most ignored questions. Pascal lived during the Enlightenment, when thinkers first began to scorn belief in a soul and the afterlife, matters that seemed to them primitive and unsophisticated. Pascal said of such people, “Do they profess to have delighted us by telling us that they hold our soul to be only a little wind and smoke, especially by telling us this in a haughty and self-satisfied tone of voice? Is this a thing to say gaily? Is it not, on the contrary, a thing to say sadly, as the saddest thing in the world?”

I still belong to Amnesty International and contribute money to it. I believe in the cause, but I believe in it for different reasons. Why do strangers such as Ahmad and Joseph and Jorge deserve my time and energy? I can think of only one reason: They bear the sign of ultimate worth, the image of God.

Amnesty International teaches a more advanced theology than the Chicago Health Club. It points past the surface of skin and shape to the inner person. But the organization stops short—for what makes the inner person worth preserving, unless it be a soul? And for that very reason, shouldn’t Christians lead the way in human rights? According to the Book of Genesis, all humans, including Jorge and Ahmad and Joseph, are immortal beings who bear some mark of the Creator.

Facing Death Head-On

Members of the Chicago Health Club do their best to defy or at least forestall death. Amnesty International works diligently to prevent it. But another group I attended faces death head-on.

I was first invited to Make Today Count, a support group for people with life-threatening illnesses, by my neighbor Jim, who had just learned he was dying of cancer. There we met other people, mostly in their thirties, who were battling such diseases as multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, and various kinds of cancer. For each member of the group, all of life had boiled down to two issues: surviving and, failing that, preparing for death.

We sat in a hospital waiting area on garish orange molded plastic chairs (doubtless chosen to make the institution appear more cheerful). We tried to ignore the loudspeaker periodically crackling out an announcement or paging a doctor. The meeting began with each member “checking in.” Jim whispered to me that this was the most depressing part of the meeting, because often someone had died since last month’s meeting. The social worker provided details of the missing member’s last days and the funeral.

The members of Make Today Count confronted death because they had no choice. I had expected a somber mood, but found the opposite. Tears flowed freely, of course, but these people spoke easily about disease and death. Clearly, the group was the one place they could talk openly about such issues.

Nancy showed off a new wig, purchased to cover the baldness caused by chemotherapy. She joked that she had always wanted straight hair, and now her brain tumor had given her an excuse. Steve, a young black man with Hodgkin’s disease, admitted he was terrified of what lay ahead. His fiancee refused to discuss the future with him. How could he break through to her?

Martha talked about death. ALS (“Lou Gehrig’s disease”) had already rendered her legs and arms useless. Now she breathed with great difficulty, and whenever she fell asleep at night there was a danger of death from oxygen deprivation. Martha was 25 years old. “What is it you fear about death?” someone asked. Martha thought a minute, and then said this: “I regret all that I’m going to miss—next year’s big movies, for example, and the election results. And I fear that I will one day be forgotten. That I’ll just disappear, and no one will even miss me.”

More than any other people I had met, members of Make Today Count concentrated on ultimate issues. They, unlike the Chicago Health Clubbers, could not deny death; their bodies bore a memento mori, a reminder of inevitable, premature death. Every day they were, in Augustine’s phrase, “deafened by the clanking chains of mortality.” I wanted to use them as examples for my hedonistic friends, to walk down the street and interrupt parties to announce, “We’re all going to die. I have proof. Just around the corner is a place where you can see it for yourself. Have you thought about death?”

Yet would such awareness change anyone for more than a few minutes? As one of Saul Bellow’s characters puts it, the living speed like birds over the surface of water, and one will dive or plunge but not come up again. But the world goes on, while five thousand people die in America each day.

One night Donna, a member of Make Today Count, told about watching a television program on a public-access station. In the program, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross discussed a boy in Switzerland who was dying of an inoperable brain tumor. Nobody knew how aware the boy was of his condition. Kübler-Ross asked him to draw how he felt. He drew a large, ugly, military tank, and behind the tank, a small house with trees, grass, sunshine, and an open window. In front of the tank, just at the end of the gun barrel, he drew a tiny figure with a red stop sign in his hand.

Donna said that picture captured her feelings precisely. Kübler-Ross had gone on to describe the five stages of grief, culminating in the stage of acceptance. And Donna knew she was supposed to work toward acceptance. But she could never get past the stage of fear. Like the little boy in front of the tank, she saw death as an enemy.

Someone brought up religious faith and belief in an afterlife, but the comment evoked the same response in Make Today Count as it had in Amnesty International: a long silence, a cleared throat, a few rolled eyes. The rest of the evening, the group focused on how Donna could overcome her fears and grow toward the acceptance stage of grief.

I left that meeting with a heavy heart. Our materialistic, undogmatic culture was asking its members to defy their deepest feelings. Donna and the small Swiss boy with the brain tumor had, by sheer primal instinct, struck upon a cornerstone of Christian theology. Death is an enemy, the last enemy to be destroyed. How could members of a group that each month saw families fall apart and bodies deteriorate before their eyes still wish for a spirit of bland acceptance? I could think of only one appropriate response to Donna’s impending death: “Damn you, Death!”

There was another aspect of Christian theology too, the one, most sadly, that Make Today Count would not discuss. The Swiss boy had included his vision of heaven in the background, represented by the grass and trees and the cottage with an open window. And any feeling like “acceptance” would only be appropriate if he truly was going somewhere, somewhere like home.

That is why I consider the doctrine of heaven one of our most neglected doctrines. George MacDonald once wrote a letter to his stepmother on the death of someone close to her. “God would not let [death] be the law of His Universe if it were what it looks to us,” he said. It’s up to us to tell the world what death looks like from the perspective of One who faced it—with fear and dread—but then came back to life.

“I think it is very hard for secular men to die,” said Ernest Becker, as he turned to God in the last months of his life.

Living Under Death’S Shadow

In the Prado Museum in Madrid, there hangs a painting by Hans Baldung (1476–1545) titled The Stages of Life, with Death. On the ground lies a newborn child, resting peacefully. Three pale, elongated figures stand over the child. On the left is a nearly nude woman, the archetype of classical beauty, her skin like alabaster, her figure round and smooth, her hair braided into long strands that cascade down her back. To her right stands an old hag with shriveled, sagging breasts and a sharp, angular face. The hag has her right hand on the beautiful woman’s shoulder and, with a mocking, toothless sneer, is pulling the young woman toward her.

The hag’s left arm is interlocked with that of a third person, a horrid figure straight out of Hieronymous Bosch. Man or woman, you cannot tell. Human features have melted down in a macabre, rotting corpse, with long, slender worms crawling out of its cadaverous belly. The hairless head is nearly a skull. The corpse holds an hourglass.

Hans Baldung’s painting restores, visually, what humanity lost after Prometheus. The beautiful woman has regained the knowledge of the hour of death. Birth, youth, old age—they are all lived out under death’s shadow.

The painting lacks one thing: a vision of a resurrected body, a body more glorious than anyone could paint. It is hard for us to live in awareness of death; it may be even harder to live in awareness of the afterlife. We hope for recreated bodies while inhabiting aged and ailing ones. Charles Williams once admitted that the notion of immortality never seemed to stir his imagination, no matter how hard he tried. “Our experience on earth makes it difficult for us to apprehend a good without a catch in it somewhere,” he said.

Perhaps another way of saying it would be to say that human life is lived out on Holy Saturday. What happened on that next day gives us a bright and startling clue to the riddle of the universe. One man, the Son of God, went before us, to show us the way. But we are mortals, and whispers of death tend to drown out hints of life to come.

The apostle Paul wrote these words to people who, like us, could not imagine a good without a catch in it:

“Though outwardly we are wasting away [despite all our health club attempts to reverse entropy], yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles [Light and momentary! Paul’s troubles remind me of the stories of tortured prisoners I hear at Amnesty International] are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.…

“For while we are in this tent, we groan [drawn, haggard, chemotherapied faces from Make Today Count come to mind], and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come” (2 Cor. 4:16b—18; 5:4–5, NIV).

Yes, we need a renewed awareness of death. But we need far more. We need a faith, in the midst of our groanings, that death is not the last word, but the next to last. What is mortal will be swallowed up by life. One day all whispers of death will fall silent.

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