I’ve been preaching this summer about some of those big, fundamental, categories of our lives that we usually don’t talk about. Those issues that are simply too weighty and too tender, guaranteed to raise anxiety if we meditate on them privately, guaranteed to raise an argument if we bring them up publicly.
In July we addressed Politics, Religion, and Sex. Next week I’ll end this series with some thoughts about Taxes. That will be fun. For today, though, perhaps the most uncomfortable and most important topic of the series, the issue of Death.
There’s a famous piece of contemporary art that consists of a dead shark floating in a glass case filled with formaldehyde. The artist is Damien Hirst. He created the work in 1991.
In case you don’t know the work I’m talking about let me describe it a little more fully.
The shark is a tiger shark, about 14 feet long. The glass case, called a vitrine is about 20 feet long, seven feet high and seven feet wide. The vitrine is framed with supporting steel but is otherwise glass all around so that you look through either the side of the piece, or the ends, to see inside at the shark which is more or less at eye level. The formaldehyde is clear, so it looks as though the shark is floating in water tinted slightly blue/green. The shark’s mouth is open, so if you look in from the head end you can look through the shark’s teeth down into the blackness of its gullet.
The title of the artwork is this: “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”
I think, for the artist, that the title has two meanings.
One meaning is the contradiction in the mind of the viewer from encountering a shark carefully presented to have all the appearance of being alive when in fact it is dead. Although the shark is motionless, it doesn’t look dead, rather, it looks as though it were removed living from a moment of time. The shark seems to live forever in the captured moment. It looks alive and with the formaldehyde will forever look alive. But we know it is dead. So the viewer’s mind constantly flips back and forth between seeing the shark as dead, then alive, then dead, and so on.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
The other meaning has to do with sharks as agents of death. The mouth is open. The teeth bared. The viewer can’t help but feel a chill of danger looking at the 14 foot shark and staring into its teeth. But the shark is also separated from the viewers behind thick steel and glass. Death approaches all of us, we know; yet death always seems distant. So again there is the flipping back and forth in the viewer’s mind: I’m frightened. But I’m safe. Death is imminent. But I’m alive for now.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
Sigmund Freud pointed out the impossibility of a person imagining the experience of being dead. We can’t have a sense of our death experience because death means the end of our experiencing anything. We can talk about death being like darkness or emptiness. But death won’t be like those experiences because death won’t be an experience for us at all.
In his essay, “Reflections on War and Death” from 1918, Freud says this: “We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators.” In other words, it’s not possible to imagine being our self while having no experience, because our sense of self is created by experiences. So instead, the best we can do in imagining death is imagine it happening to a separate self with us standing by observing. But that, of course, isn’t the same thing at all.
Freud goes on to say this: “The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality.”
So Freud says, because none of us can truly imagine ourselves being dead, we think of ourselves as immortal, at least unconsciously. Everyone knows we will die. Death happens to other people. None of us thinks we will be exempt. But we can’t imagine what it will be like for ourselves. And so we flip back and forth in our minds from, “Of course, I will die” to acting as though we will live forever.
And there’s the problem.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
Last November, I contributed an item to the church’s annual auction fundraiser. I offered to write a sermon on any topic that the highest bidder wanted me to preach about. Linda Banez-Kay won the auction. And thank you, Linda, for your donation to the church. In May, Linda and I had lunch together and we talked about her ideas for this sermon.
Honestly, I was a little anxious about offering to write a sermon on demand. What if the winner wanted me to talk about something that I know nothing about, or worse, a subject that I have no interest in learning about? What if the assigned topic was a controversial subject where whatever I said would offend one half of the congregation or the other? Or what if the subject really had no connection to spiritual issues and would violate my understanding of the purpose of our worship hour?
Fortunately, Linda’s requested topic was entirely appropriate for worship, and a good fit for me as a preacher. She requested a sermon on death, which I’ve thought about extensively both in my earlier work with people with AIDS at AIDS Project Los Angeles and my current career as a minister. Preaching about death might be uncomfortable, for some, but not controversial, and contemplation of death lies directly at the heart of the spiritual task.
Linda asked me to give the congregation a day to think seriously about death: our personal death. She wanted a sermon that for twenty minutes would stay our minds from flipping away from “the impossibility of death in the mind of someone living” to really sitting with our mortality. She hoped a sermon would counter our unconscious belief in our immortality, and bring the truth of our eventual death to consciousness long enough to do something with that truth, to ask ourselves, because my death is inevitable what should I do? What can I do to prepare? What will I do differently knowing that I am going to die?
A few weeks ago, the New York Times living section published an article by Shosana Berger and BJ Miller titled, “Why You Need to Make a ‘When I Die’ File—Before It’s Too Late.” Ms. Berger is a magazine writer and editor. Mr. Miller is an MD practicing medicine and teaching palliative care at UC San Francisco. Together they’ve written a book titled, A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death.
A lot of Ms. Berger’s and Dr. Miller’s suggestions are the same kinds of practical suggestions that Linda wanted me to recommend to all of you during my sermon today. All of us should have an Advance Directive, telling caregivers what kind of treatment we want (and don’t want) in case we’re in a situation where we can’t speak for ourselves. We all should have a will and a living trust. And although those basics seem obvious I suspect many people in this room don’t have either of those documents.
Berger and Miller recommend that each of us create a file, clearly labeled and in an obvious place, where we keep all of the documents they recommend. They call it a “When I Die” file.
They tell a story of a woman named Ruth Byock, who lived in the Laguna Woods Lesiure World. At age 81, she was driving herself to her daughter’s home for Thanksgiving dinner when she died suddenly of a heart attack. It was left to Ruth’s daughter, Molly, and her brother, Ira, to go to Ruth’s condo and try to figure out what to do.
Imagine what a gift it was to Ruth’s children when they discovered on the kitchen counter a file box. They assumed it was for recipes. But when they opened it they found her “When I Die” file.
“Inside, their mother had carefully organized all of her papers, including the account numbers, pending transactions, and a bundle of other documents they’d need to settle her affairs and distribute her belongings. It was as though their mother had baked them one last batch of kugel from beyond and left it waiting there for them to arrive. ‘This was not a Buddhist master’s awareness of death,’ Ira Byock says. ‘It was a Jewish mother’s love for her children.’”
Besides the forms like an Advance Directive and a copy of your will and trust, what else should go in the file?
How about the passwords for your computer and email and your facebook account? What’s the PIN number to open your smart phone? How about contact information for your attorney, your financial advisor, and the cleaning lady, and the gardener? Why make your loved ones hunt for information about your bank account, your gas and electric and water service?
Monthly charges for your cell phone, cable subscription, gym membership and so on will continue after you die until canceled, so your survivor needs to know what you’ve signed up for. With a death certificate it’s possible for a relative to close your accounts. But if a relative has the account number and your password it might be possible to close many of those accounts directly online. Or you can add your survivor’s name to the accounts.
If you want help with some of those items, like an Advance Directive or Power of Attorney, Linda Banez Kay is a wonderful resource with many simple fill-in-the-blank forms that you can complete in a few minutes. I encourage you to connect with her after the service.
Here are a few other things to include in your “When I Die” file.
Your will probably includes some instructions about cremation or burial. But what about your preferences for the memorial service?
When Joyce Wheeler died last year and I was preparing her memorial service, I was blessed to have a document in the church’s files that she had filled out 20 years earlier. It was a simple form with some simple instructions, but because I had it, I had a sense of who Joyce was even though I’d never met her. And I was able to craft a memorial service that I was confidant reflected her and her wishes.
On the form’s question about preferences for a funeral or memorial Joyce had written, “Perhaps a celebration of life rather than pity for joining the universal flow.” That even gave me a little hint of her theology that I could reflect on in my homily. And elsewhere, where the form asked for her thoughts about death, Joyce had written, “I am like Woody Allen. I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” So I got a sense of her humor, and a funny line in her own voice I could share during the service.
Is there a special reading you’d like included in your memorial? Should we sing you favorite hymn? What’s you favorite flower? Do you have beliefs about the afterlife you’d want the minister to refer to in the service?
Ms. Berger and Dr. Miller recommend two other kinds of items for your “When I Die” file. These don’t require an attorney, or a notary, or even a form.
One, is to include personal letters to your significant loved ones. If you die suddenly, like having a heart attack while driving to your daughter’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, a letter can take the place of the goodbyes that you didn’t have the chance to make in person. How nice for Ruth Byock’s children that their mother’s “When I Die” file helped them resolve both the practical issues of her death, and included letters that helped them resolve the emotional issues of her death.
And two, Berger and Miller recommend something called an “Ethical Will.” I thought this was a beautiful idea. An Ethical Will is a personal statement of your values. It’s a collection of the life lessons and concerns of deepest importance that you wish to leave behind, the way that your legal will is a statement of your wishes about physical things. Berger and Miller borrowed this idea from a hospice medical director named Dr. Barry Baines who wrote a book called, Ethical Wills: Putting Your Values on Paper. Dr. Blaine says, “I like to say it’s your values alongside your valuables.” Why are you giving a portion of your estate to your church? Why do you wish to be cremated instead of buried? How can the people who love you honor your values as they continue with their own lives? You can answer all those questions in your Ethical Will.
And with talk of the values that guide our living and our dying, I close with some thoughts about Unitarian Universalism.
Universalism is the theology of universal salvation. It was originally developed as a theology of the after life. The orthodox Christian belief is that there will be a division in the after life between those in Heaven with God, and those separated from God, in Hell. Universalism corrects this theology by recognizing that a God whose primary quality is love could not be satisfied with an eternal separation among creation. Eventually, God’s love will reconcile all universally, to salvation.
When Unitarian Universalism rejected the idea of a creed with the church dictating beliefs to our members, Unitarian Universalism, became agnostic about life after death as we are agnostic about all metaphysical beliefs. Instead we turned our attention from a next-worldly salvation we can only guess at to this-worldly salvation we can know something about and participate in.
So you might think that a sermon about death would be a sermon speculating on the afterlife. That’s what you’d get in most churches, I suspect. But, Linda wanted me to talk about how we live this life in the face of death, which is a very Unitarian Universalist thing to do.
What may happen for each of us after we die none of us can say, and as Freud reminds us, there may not even be an “us” around to experience it. But this world we can know. And this world can be the arena where we work to create our salvation. The question that motivates our Unitarian Universalism while we live is, what can I do today, for myself and for others, and for the world we share, to make this world look more like the expression of my religious values? How can I help, while I’m alive, to create the “heaven on earth” we seek?
It is a theology not of the next life, but of the end of this life. A theology not of death, but of the final act of living. What would be the compassionate, helpful, kind, reality-based contribution we could make for the good of those who will carry on in this world once we leave it?
The first thing we can do, in this world, and for this world, is to accept that one day we will leave this world. And one last contribution we can make before we leave, one final gift we can give this world, is to help our loved ones through their difficult time of mourning by giving them every aid and comfort we can give. That begins by taking care of ourselves while we live. Living as long and fully and joyfully as we can. And it means accepting the inevitability of death and preparing for it while we are able, not for our own sakes, but for the world we leave behind.
Our papers in order. Our wishes clear. Our estate clearly designated to the people or organizations where it will do the most good. A final statement that names and expresses our values.
And perhaps a file box arranged on our kitchen counter labeled simply and profoundly, “When I Die.”