I was very touched by your personal story. Thank you for sharing it and the lessons it taught you. I think the half awake state you touched on is a wonderful metaphor because we can all be in that place at times . . . some more permanently than others.

Albert Einstein said a very similar thing to your last few statements: “The most fundamental question we can ever ask ourselves is whether or not the universe we live in is friendly or hostile.” I agree wholeheartedly (with you and that other genius I mentioned). I really feel that the way you think about and answer this question sets the context for your life.

I appreciate your contributions immensely. Thank you as always for sharing!

O.K., now for the feedback you asked for about this topic. Indeed life is dynamic. Just how dynamic is born out by the infinite number of ways an individual life can play out. Why does one person who grows up in poverty manage to rise up into a productive and meaningful existence while someone else with seemingly all of life’s advantages end up bitter and broken? Simplistic answers would say one worked harder than the other, one is lazy, one thought life should be handed to them on a silver platter, one was made tougher by life’s circumstances and one was made softer. The list goes on but the point is that I find these inadequate explanations. Upon further investigation we might find that one had a family history of alcohol and drug abuse or was genetically prone to depression. We might find that one had the love and support of a mother from the time of birth while the other was sexually abused as a child. I could still go on but what I would contend is that individual circumstances are so unique it is virtually impossible to compare one person’s circumstances to another even if on the surface their situations appear to be identical. I’m just warming up, so bear with me.
When I was twelve years old I was awakened by my parents in my bed room. It was early in the morning and I was in a half awake / half dream state as I heard them telling me that my closest brother had been killed in a car accident. The sensation which I will never forget was as if someone had taken a cold wet towel and struck the back of my neck with it. I awoke to tears of the deepest pain I have ever experienced. In the hours, days and weeks that followed my moods alternated between an inescapable and unbearable pain, a deep melancholy and a feeling that it was all a dream from which I would soon awake. I would go to bed at night in pain. I would wake up in the morning and the pain would still be there. The pattern that repeated for me was one of thinking I could not stand the pain, trying to figure out how to make my brother’s death not be true, thinking it was all a dream and then repeating the process all over. Again and again.
I don’t usually share this story so understand that I am not just being self indulgent. What I have learned from this experience is this. Many of us live in an idealized world bordering almost on fantasy. Some of us experience severe shocks that shake us from our illusions about life. However we should not chastise ourselves too much for the constructed worlds that we live in; much of it has almost biological origins. If we were to consider the truth of how precarious our existence is moment by moment we could not function. People who are overly sensitized to the reality of daily threats are rightly diagnosed as having phobias. Simply put, though our deaths are an absolute certainty they are also a reality that cannot be fully embraced on a day to day level lest we be incapacitated. In other words a certain amount of denial is in order.
So let me fine tune this a little. Plenty of people factor in the reality of their deaths in a way that is truthful and healthy. The entire point of Zen Buddhism is to accept the extinction of the self and to embrace it. As the Dalai Lama demonstrates, rather than this making someone morbid it can in fact make them delightful and warm. There are many other examples we could give of this phenomenon.
The question that is not quite answered yet is your question which I would paraphrase as, “What is the truth of this death of which we speak?” Therein lies the rub because in an absolute sense we don’t know what that truth is.
Meister Eckhart asserts that how we answer the question of truth can also determine what truth is. He observed that in the concentration camps the reality was that those incarcerated were going to die. The undeniable truth of the camps was that they were constructed for the simple purpose of annihilating people. If you were in a camp you were dead. However some people survived. Eckhart found that among those who survived there was a common feature. Those who survived believed they were going to survive. All other factors seemed moot.
Now if we grant Eckhart’s thesis then we also need to understand what he is not saying. He is not saying that wishing something to be so will make it so. Nobody wished harder than me that my brother would not be dead. But to make the point that your blog has already explicated so well, it is important to not prematurely accept something as inevitable that in fact may not be inevitable. One of the challenges for America and the Obama administration is that we have for too long had diminished expectations of what is possible.
A few more things I learned from the experience of my brother’s death. Never tell anyone bad news until they are fully awake. My own clinical training years later made me realize that I was particularly vulnerable in the state I was in when told of my brother’s death. That is also a metaphor for me about life. Some things can only be gotten through by going through them. There are no short cuts or ways to ease the pain. The pain is going to take as long as it is going to take. Unless you try to short circuit the pain in which case it is going to last much, much longer. Being half awake to life, being drugged or engaging in any kind of self-medicating behavior makes things worse not better.
My comments certainly included some rather dark places and I didn’t even go into all the things that major stress events can do us. But I was struck as you were by the woman’s comment that she wanted to “accept her daughter’s death.” Without mitigating the painful content of that statement I would just add that ultimately the question of life comes down to whether or not we accept that life is good. Some of us feel that the universe is not cold and cruel but is built on a benevolent principle. Embracing this universe and giving oneself over to it seems the only choice worth living out. As hard as that can be sometimes.