THE SURPRISE OF DEATH

 

When death comes it is always a surprise to us. Even when we are expecting it, when it is impending, it seems to catch us unawares. We think that he or she is so young, even as we are waiting for the curtain to fall for people for whom we know death is near, our minds reject death as a reality. He or she is too young to die and we resist the knowledge of approaching mortality.

Last week, hearing of D.'s death, whom I did not know, was an astonishing bit of news. Jack was relating that he and D. were having a cup of coffee together just on the Friday before his suicide, and they were discussing the fact that neither had been attending to their meetings quite as regularly as they should have. And they agreed that doing a ninety and ninety was the remedy for the creeping chaos in their lives and so they committed themselves to the task.

And then D. killed himself and Jack asked what this was all about. Why did he get to live and D. decide suddenly that life was not worth living? Had D. not had a gun, would the outcome have been less dire?

I suspect that when we are very depressed we all have tendencies to think about suicide at the point when we feel most useless and cannot see a way out. But a gun is so final that its ready availability makes its employment an instrument of remedy that permits no retreat.

The week before D.'s suicide I was speaking to a patient at the rehab facility where I volunteer. She had been addicted to narcotics and in her despair and desperation with the direction of her life, she took an overdose.  She was awakened in the emergency room when the doctors gave her a medication to bring her back from the overdose. Her first words upon awakening were "I don't want to die, help me!"

With a gun around, there is no moment of reprieve. We just die without the chance to come to our senses to ask, to plead for another chance.

Then there are those of us for whom death is an expected outcome. And leaving aside the idea that life itself is a death sentence, some of us get there sooner than others. Those who have terminal illnesses would like reprieves. With death knocking upon our door post, we have had the time to consider where we might have changed what we did with our lives and how we might have done that.

Regrets come all too easily.

There are a few who, having faced death, realize that although there is much that they could have done, they are nonetheless satisfied with what they have accomplished. And I have heard that story over and over again from friends who had relatives and sponsors and colleagues in the AA program who, having righted the course of a life gone so wrong, accept the coming of the end with equanimity.

The act of sobriety is sometimes accomplishment enough to feel that one has lived a complete and satisfying life. The alternative, which is to use impending mortality as an excuse to "go out", is an insufficient option. It serves no purpose other than to make one oblivious to everything around you and to withdraw, once again, from the society of human beings.

But for those left behind, there is a loss. Whatever the expectations of the dying and dead, in the end they knew what was happening and perhaps had a personal knowledge of where they were going. For the mourners, it is most often an incomprehensible finality because we feel that we have been left behind.

I have fantasies as to where these "souls" go after death. I even fantasize about my death and wonder at the pity of not being with my loved ones anymore, never to be able to sit down to a nice chat with friends, nevermore to be able to embrace a loved daughter and wife.

It seems, such a waste.

But how much more of a waste to have built a lifetime of trust in one's recovery to end it all in a blaze of drunken "glory".  All of the trust that we have squirreled away in getting sober will be lost and that memory of our battles with the grape, and thus  our legacy of sobriety, will have been squandered.

In the end, it is only the memory of that legacy that we can take with us so that we can die with a dignity of a life lived well.

© res 3/3/2013