Being Mortal is Not Easy

Mortality is not for the weak and cowardly, and it doesn’t work very well for the strong and courageous either. Let’s face it:  our brains do not like the idea we have to grow old and die no matter how incrementally and gradual the process.   We are not happy about it. We do what we can to deny the fact and try not think about it.  Read, The Denial of Death by Ernst Becker.

Over the millennia, the human brain has devised all sorts of mechanisms to deal with and thereby try to control death.  As I get older, I find myself worrying, anticipating, being fatalistic, going to the doctor in the hope of catching some potentially catastrophic ailment before it develops, going through multiple colonoscopies, telling myself not to worry since it is out of my control. 

But I’m also a theologian and I think about dying theologically.  There are many theological rationales:  It’s all in God’s hands.  It’s part of some inscrutable mysterious hidden plan.  Or it’s not part of any plan.  It’s a matter of chance but God will walk through it with you.  Heaven means being with God forever.  There is no heaven.  All the rationales can be quite subtle and sophisticated.  Or I sometimes think, there is no God and when you die, you will just disappear the same way you do when they put you under for surgery.  The tumble of the pinball electric thoughts in my brain do not stop.

Then, I get tired of obsessing about the subject.  Yes, I’m getting older but I’m just not going to think about it.  I’ll read a book, teach my classes, watch another show, talk about politics, have a cookie or two cookies, go out and eat at a nice restaurant with my wife, eat more bagels, watch more baseball, have a beer, enjoy life.

Finally, there are the gratitude people, the Stoics and the Buddhists who try to assuage their fear by declaring they are grateful “for a life well lived” and welcome their fate and the setting sun.  And just when I say to myself, “that’s the way to go”, I hear the raspy voice of Dylan Thomas urging his father, “Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage Rage against the dying of the light.”

Is it worth it?  Is mortality worth the worry and the anxiety of getting old and walking into that night? 

Yes, it is!  For all the craziness of life and there is more than enough, we want more.  Debilitating diseases, monster hurricanes, destructive tornadoes, massive earthquakes, cancers large and small, crazy political leaders, Holocausts and more.  Nothing diminishes our desire to see the morning sun one more time. 

Being mortal is not easy but we were created to love life, so I am glad to be sitting here typing another blog and hoping you will take time in your brain to read it.  Being mortal is not easy but the old joke about the two Jewish grandmas eating at an old restaurant is apt.  One says to the other, “The food here is terrible.”  The other replies, “Yes, and they don’t give seconds.”