The Thing About Death

Very little can be said about death, really. Someone dies, and the loss is felt like a thick lead shirt, or a drug that drags those who have been left behind down to a level of dreadful elemental emotion. It’s appalling yet unavoidable to imagine the final moments of terror as the bus reels over the edge of the muddy road and careens down into the jungle below, with bodies, packages, and live animals in cages flying everywhere. Moments of confusion and excruciating pain perhaps. Or simply a bad dream. Then, darkness?

We don’t know. We do know that the event was arbitrary and senseless. We know that nothing will ever be the same for us again. The shared fabric of experience has been rudely, violently torn, and though it seems that we are still “all of a piece,” we have been shattered and undone, to the point where a part of us says, irrationally but sincerely, “Why live?” There is no way to think ourselves out of this hole. It only remains to continue living with dogged determination, with each day, each passing hour, reminding us of that sweet being who is no longer with us. Where is she?

Personally, I don’t believe that death is the end. I am not referring here to any facile theory of returning to the bosom of the earth, of the cycles of nature or the Fall of Freddy the Leaf. Such theories seem to suggest that we would just as soon be a clod of dirt as a thinking, acting, loving human being. Not so. Nor do they begin to address the overwhelming echo of absence that death leaves in its wake. No, I belief that death is not the end is based on the fact that my presence in this universe is too central, too deep, too personal, even to be hinted at, much less grasped or accounted for by materialistic theories of evolutionary processes. Such theories do give us a glimmer of understanding about the development of the universe, and they are not to be despised. But they fail to explain the remarkable singularity of this tissue of flesh and nerve and bone that I, personally, command. As it is for me, so must it also be for all of us.

Everyone knows intuitively, though the truth is often lost or obscured by circumstances, that the uniqueness of individual being has an intimate connection with divinity. It’s the basis of religion, though neither Christ nor Mohammed explained it very well. What we love and admire about others is that they are like us...only not. Our children most of all, perhaps. They come from within us, but more radically from within themselves, and spew forth their enthusiasms, devise their projects for the future, bring new forms of beauty to the eye, new perspectives and insights to the table for discussion, drawing from sources of which we are largely unfamiliar. We share in, are stimulated by, and truly love this conclave of positive energy—child, parent, spouse, sibling, friend, colleague. This “being with” in all its forms is what life is all about. Nothing more, nothing less.

Yet how can we “be with” someone who isn’t here? We can’t. And that’s what grief is all about.

Meghan Sennott, my wife Hilary’s cousin’s daughter, died on a mountain road in Peru this spring. I had the opportunity to spent some time with her at family gatherings occasionally over the years, and I looked forward to hearing about her travels, her interests, and the progress of her academic career. I was always impressed by her intelligence and her enthusiasms, but also by her guilelessness and modesty. She was moving into adulthood, but she hadn’t forgotten how to be a kid. Venturing into the interior of Morocco with three of her girlfriends? Traveling in Bosnia not long after the war? Meghan was an adventurous soul, there can be no doubt about that.

I remember playing ping-pong with Meghan in the basement at one Thanksgiving celebration. And Uncle Dan and I once challenged her, along with one of her girlfriends, to a backyard soccer match. (We had the long strides, but they had the superior moves!) I remember talking with her at various times about ancient Egypt, classical music, Radiohead, and I (Heart) Huckabees. She loved history, but was fascinated by science, and seemed to lap up everything with extraordinary ease. Yet she wisely feared the specialization that advanced study in either field would inevitably have required. Science journalism was the last of her career notions that I heard about, and it seemed like a good one to me.

One evening last summer her dad and I went to a flamenco studio in South Minneapolis. I was writing an article about the “master” who was giving the workshop, and Rick, who is a photographer with the paper, thought there might be a story there. Meghan and her mom, Laura, came along too, and I enjoyed watching Rick and Meghan interact as he gave his daughter a few bits of advice about when and how to shoot a picture.

Afterward we went across the street to Manny’s Tortes on Lake Street to have a snack. We chatted about duende and the difference between being “the best” and being “the most interesting.”

So? So nothing. These are fleeting and inconsequential images that could be multiplied a thousand-fold by those who raised Meghan, lived with her, and knew her well. These are the things that make up a life. These are the things that you lose when you die. This are the things one misses. It would be pointless, I think, to advance the glib affirmation that Meghan’s spirit is here, when the daily presence that constitutes her spirit is palpably not here. On the other hand, we have no good reason to presume that she isn’t somewhere.