Facing death

“We were born alone, die alone” my grandmother used to say. That is what came to my mind when I was listening to the former Bishop, John Spong in the radio program, “Tapestry,” in last Tuesday class (Feb. 15) Radio.  It is true, I believe, that when you were born, only you can face to your own birth, and no one can go through your own death with you.  There is only you and birth, you and death right next each other. 

I believe that it is not easy thing to come out into this world. Luckily we don’t remember it.  One time in Maine, I went to the seminar for Rebirthing. Rebirth and Here or Here   Rebirthing is usually used by some practitioners for correcting a pattern of the person’s life.  Rebirthing means breathing work.  Some practitioners believe that your first breathing pattern will shape your life.  What they do is to re-experience person’s own birth and teach the person how to take first breath. From what I experienced, it is actually very powerful thing although it sounds cultic.  It all depends on whom you choose to be the one to lead you through this process it could be very sincere.

Death, on the other hand, is the fact that we spend all our lifetime to learn to admit that it is coming and how to face it.  In Western cultures, I feel people try to postpone to do “this learning” as much as they could because they tend to put “death” in fear category.  In my culture in Japan, we live with death. (at least when I was growing up there) Because most of family lives with grandparents we always see and hear death here and there, although that is not the case anymore in big cities. “Death” is “our ancestor,” and they are always with us in our daily life in Japan.  Most of households have a small temple called “Butsudan,” and we put a cup of water and food for them everyday and pray, and change flowers a couple times a week. You see, I know my ancestors are there and when my time comes I am going to join them over there.  I know them, they are my family, so why should I feel fear about death?  (But I do fear the process of death, as Dena talked about it in last class.  I wonder this feeling of fear for the process of death is same as fear of death?)

When you are very close to someone, and when the person died, you don’t feel fear you feel love. That is what I think we need to do in order to face our own death.  From the birth, we are right next to death, so we might as well start knowing death to that point you are very familiar with it.  Don’t pretend it is not exist.  I lost my father when I was 11 years old.  My sister and I were there beside my father until his last breath.  My family never excluded us from his death.  Only thing we didn’t see was probably when nurse cleaned his body after his death.  I have a lot to tell when I see him again over there.  As Dr. Plumb said, this might be one of stories to comfort people to face death, but I believe that we (people in Japan) could go beyond superstitious thoughts which John Spong was talking about on the radio show. Because we have this custom in our culture, that doesn’t mean we are not able to go beyond superstitious thoughts.  In a way we are, because it is not God we are connecting to, we are connecting to our family, to our history, which was real at one point of time.  They were here and now they are over there.  As John Spong said in the radio interview that it is hard to explain death/eternal life because language itself is a creature of time and space, and he is trying to explain the experience which is not bounded by time and space.  He could not have said better. I am trying here as well to explain the difference between my culture and this western culture how we deal with death differently, and I am not sure I am doing well.  Buddhism is a religious but it is not God in Japan, and we didn’t need “to invent a religious or certain kind of God to go through death.” Radio  We have our ancestor, and they are not our invention, they were real in our history, they are our history. 

Ginger told us in last Tuesday class (Feb. 15); when she took a class of “Hell study” many people withdrew after they had realized that the instructor was not going to teach “the hell” most of people know as “a hell.”  It is such a difficult thing to invite new way of thinking and looking at things.  People are not comfortable if “their zoon” was invaded.  So, my way of looking at “death” is also another community of practice.  Just like Lave and Wenger said in the book of “Situated Learning Legitimate Peripheral Participation”, activity has to be transparent for newcomers to learn, and become a member of the community.  But people don’t practice this way in term of knowing “Death” especially in this western culture. It is not life after death; it is to be part of our history.  I would like to bring Tomasello’s theory back here again, because I believe this is also what he is saying in his book of “The Cultural Origin of Human Cognition”.  We have developed ourselves through phylogentically, historically, and ontogenetically, and we can’t ignore our history even for death.  If you would like to connect death to God, that is OK, but then, you need to bring God to everyday life, so you are very close to God and familiar with God, your fear for death would transform to something you are familiar with, and going to the place where you are familiar with.

At the end of this Blog, I would like to talk about one more thing: materialism. This is the hardest part for most people, I assume.  For me, yes, it is another hardest to over come next to the fear for the process of death.  We came here with nothing, and we go back there with nothing.  You can’t take anyone and anything with you.  That is what “we were born alone and die alone” means as well, I believe.  I have learned that detaching yourself from all the materialism in this world would help you to leave your body, but easy to say and hard to do, I am still practicing this to be better.

Whenever I search for information about death or good life, I seem to come cross these words, ”to love and to be loved.” There must be a fundamental strength and answer in these actions.