As Good a Time as Any to Think About Death

Our parish may be closed, but fortunately, the core of the regular parishioners try to remain in communication with each other as lockdown physically separates us. Today, the communication brought sad news. One of our long time attendees, Bob DiFrancesca, died at midnight of the cancer he had been fighting for many years. If there is a service during this period of containment, it will only be at the graveside, 10 individuals permitted to be present at appropriate social distance.

As with so many others I have known, I think of myself as having been more than an acquaintance to Bob but not quite a friend, meaning that, outside of parish events, and seeing him at Mass and having pleasant conversations, we didn't actually spend a lot of time together. But I knew he was kind. I knew he was faithful to his Catholicism, and quietly so, one of those who would sit in the back during Mass and come to pray when there wasn't a crowd. As always with such individuals, when they pass away, I regret my having not sought out a more frequent association.

He died during the pandemic, but not of the pandemic. Gives me pause.

Don't get me wrong, the need to guard the public health of our citizenry, including myself, is not to be dismissed. But something odd there is about the herculean, cataclysmic effort to prevent people from getting or dying from the coronavirus, when there are just so many darn things that people are dying of as we speak. It is almost as if we humans can control this potential cause of death, go inside, lock our doors, then perhaps we will escape those other causes. But that's the thing that seems, at least to me, to be crazy making. We won't. We can't.

I used to have night terrors, well into adulthood, alas, when they long should have subsided. They almost always involved sudden impending death. I would wake up screaming (I have a few stories where it happened, believe it or not, amusingly, when others were present). I don't like to fly, not so much because of the dying part, but the awareness of the seconds before the dying in a tin can.

My very faith makes death not only an inevitability, but a door to eternity.  So, over the years I have tried to practice the concept of Memento Mori, Remember your Death. The idea is that keeping death before your eyes (Benedictines also highly recommend it) you live your life better in preparation for it. You will be motivated to live a good and full life. I haven't been good at the practice. Like most of us, I tend to focus on the fear part, not the motivation part. I haven't been good at taking creative or even some physical risks (not wild ones I might add but to me almost anything is wild, raised as I was in a be careful style of parenting). Living a good life? I don't know. I suppose I have done a little bit of that, but I can tell you my motivations aren't as pure as I would like.

As I write I have been remembering a painting I stood in front of a long time when I was in London in 2013. It was in the National Gallery. I had never heard of it, though it is very famous and highly discussed. It was painted by Holbein, the Younger. Him I knew of, at least in theory. Anyway, it is a painting of two well dressed men, an ambassador and his friend. They are clearly rich. And they are clearly men to be well regarded. Aside from the sharpness of the color of the paint, so much so that it almost felt like a photograph, I was intrigued by this almost flat, ghostly, floating skull in the foreground. I stood there a long time. I got close. I got far away. I think it was after that, reading about the painting, that I learned of memento mori.

http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-paintings/the-ambassadors-holbein.htm

The thing about it, this way of thinking, is that if your prayer, or meditation, brings fruit, it will be that you/I will let go of the need to hold on so tightly to life that you pretend it won't end, and you can actually, I can actually, enjoy that life instead of shrivelling up in a futile effort to protect myself.

Besides, as to me, if I believe in the Resurrection, then there was never anything to fear. Remembering death is to remember the promise of eternity.

Well, that's at I have come to think. I wish I could live it better. Hopefully, there is still time.