Post #140: Sickness and Death

11 Sep. 2024

     Health, it has often been observed, is not felt as a positive good until it is lost; only then can we appreciate it fully, looking back to how much better things were before, when our own bodies did not put up such resistance to our doings. It is the same problem that would beset a problem-free life, if such a thing could be imagined: without problems to judge it against, how would we arrive at the conclusion that our state being was particularly good? Perhaps by seeing others suffer? Only why should that help us feel any happier, and not, to the contrary, more sad for them?

     Health, then, is not felt except in contrast to sickness, which makes up for the indefiniteness of the first by being all too concrete, urgent, and miserable. Nothing perhaps illustrates so starkly both the challenges and the promises of the Vipassana way of life, for when the body is in the throes of illness or injury, how could it possibly respond with pleasant, or even tolerable sensations? It’s not the time for complacency, but for emergency measures, usually centering on enforced rest and letting the body do what healing it can. Alas, when we have heeded the signals and done what we could to facilitate recovery, the distress signals do not simply fall silent because we can do no more. No, the horribly screeching alarms will not moderate their pitch, they may intensify even, with the pain sometimes reaching levels, as we all know, that make even death seem preferable.

     The Grim Reaper having been thus introduced, let us add that on the way to the exit there may be some truly terrible sensations to endure. Most of us cling to childish illusions about expiring peacefully in our sleep, or perhaps on the meditation mat, which may indeed happen occasionally; but for the most part, we must expect the grim reality of reaping to be far more violent, bloody, and painful. Sentient organisms have evolved over the aeons to be survival machines above all else, and they need to be beaten into submission before they will yield up life. This may be where the case for Vipassana practice is at its most unanswerable—because many of the agonies on the final laps will not respond to pain killers, even leaving aside the tricky question of whether it might not be better, as the Vipassana teachers tell us, to arrive at the gates as clear-headed as possible.

     Past the gates from which there can be no return, on the other hand, I imagine more cause for optimism. On the final stretches, as the body is preparing to give up the fight, the force of the pain may recede; so says Morrie of Tuesday fame, joking that when he used to have a cold, he felt as if he were dying, but now that he was dying, he felt as if he merely had a cold. Once the fight is truly over and the organism is resigned to dying, on the very last stretch, there is no more reason for activating the sensations that the mind-body complex has used to keep us alive for so long. Any agonies now would be completely gratuitous, and that is not usually Mother Nature’s style. Nor is it what we might reasonably surmise, with no certainty of course, from any number of near-death experiences that suggest a peaceful conclusion to life’s many troubles.

     With an important caveat, though. Though many reports from the near-beyond tell of a deeply soothing atmosphere that makes human life no longer seem so desirable (the good news as it were),* they also mention the inescapable demand for a very searching self-scrutiny, usually centering on whether one has learned and loved enough in life—with an important connection to the traditional theistic idea of eternal judgment, except that it need not be eternal, nor imposed by any outside authority. It may simply be a last recapitulation of one’s life, but it has been reported to be very intense indeed, and it seems advisable, as all religions have emphasized, to arrive at the last moment with a reasonably clear conscience. Whether all will be forgiven if one’s conscience is murky or burdened instead, or whether there will be punishment or reward, or automatic rebirth, or a choice of lives, or liberation from the cycle—all this is altogether beyond my ken and not something I wish to speculate about.

     It may also be worth considering, as one looks ahead to the inevitable, whether it seems close at hand or decades away, that human beings do often have some control, not perfect but still quite impressive, over when to end their lives, even by natural means. Note how Elizabeth II soldiered on to her Platinum Jubilee, despite losing her husband in the last year (he was less motivated by anniversaries, it appears, and might have relished the role of a contrarian early check-out, when it might still garner a bit of attention) and then promptly passed away, only a few months later, after the last milestone had been definitely and triumphantly passed. Such examples abound, and they require no special preparation. Experienced meditators, it is said, may acquire more profound powers of choosing their moment of demise, and taking the exit at a suitably pure and propitious moment.

     (I have asked myself what would follow, on the Buddhist logic, when the end comes not peacefully at all, but in an explosion, say, that rips a sentient organism completely apart in a split-second. It can happen to saints as well as sinners, and one might be puzzled as to how time enough could be left for the relatively elaborate exit procedures that Buddhist traditions have posited. I don’t know the answer, but the true nature of time is not something we understand very well, and it is at least conceivable that in such liminal moments even the most minute fraction of a second by the clock might be sufficient for all the remaining business of a lifetime, or perhaps of eternity itself.)

     As I’ve said before (in #48), I also wonder whether we are not perhaps tying ourselves in knots over the question of death quite needlessly. I see nothing so very difficult to conceive, or to accept, about mental and physical life simply being extinguished completely—the way we already experience it ceasing, very nearly, when we fall into deep dreamless sleeps or when we are put under in narcosis for an operation. Why should dying be any different from simply not waking up from these near-extinctions? The Buddhists are quite right to say that a human life is something to be grateful for, in many cases at least; but they stress, with equal justice, the ubiquitous element of suffering and dissatisfaction that is our unavoidable companion on the journey. Life is wearisome too, not just wonderful, and when the end comes at last, would we not all have reason to be glad if it proved complete? The Buddhists reserve such full extinction, with important qualifications, to those who have witnessed Nibbana; but perhaps it will turn out, in the end, to be awaiting all of us.

*Proof of Heaven (2012) by Eben Alexander, for example, although there is nothing close to a proof in the book. (See also my note to #109 on Jill Taylor Bolte and Iain McGilchrist.) It is suggestive, no more, like many other reports of a similar nature that have come to us, by their very nature, from the mental regions from which return is still possible—thus the antechambers of the mansion of death, not the main hall. What validity these high-intensity dying dreams have for anyone else is doubtful enough, but the main point is that nobody can tell us what lies beyond, because there is no returning from there.

PS: I just realized, the day after, that it was September 11th when I wrote the above musings. I didn’t notice, yesterday; I was too busy being sick with some nasty bug or other. The synchronicity, not just in my writing but also in my falling sick, may be a fitting illustration of how things seem to hang together more than we realize, mind and body, inner and outer, the beginning and the end.