One day while walking around the dirt track at Soledad prison, an unfamiliar loud noise drew my attention to that strip of bare earth known as “no-mans-land.” Between the inner and outer perimeter prison fences, I saw a bird on the ground and it looked to be having some sort of a seizure. Approximately two feet above the distressed bird were twenty to thirty of its companions. They were circling around and around while flapping their wings and loudly chirping. It appeared as though they were calling out words of encouragement to the distressed bird. Saying, “Come on, come on” – “you can do it” – “get up”! After a few minutes passed the distressed bird stopped moving and died. Its hovering companions, supportive when any signs of life were present, immediately recognized death and flew off to resume the business of being a bird.
Why was I invited to witness this intimate view of nature? I cannot say! But it marked me; setting me on a path of discovery. I began to question why human beings with their wisdom, intelligence, technology, etc., struggle with mortality. Can peace be found with our mortality in today’s world of COVID-19, global warming, terrorism, and their combined in-your-face message of vulnerability and the possibility of imminent death?
My path of discovery began with a study of research known as “Terror Management Theory”. TMT attempts to explain human behavior and attitudes as a response to our anxiety about death. I followed with copious works by Ernest Becker, author of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize- winner book The Denial of Death. I ended my cognitive path of discovery with a study on how the concept of death differs between Western and Indigenous Cultures and Western and Eastern cultures. The American Psychological Society combines and defines these studies under a single title: “thanatology”, a study of death.
Today I have the confidence to bodily state, “Yes!” it is possible to embrace your future death with a knowing peace of mind. I urge one-and-all, all to turn and face your mortality. Develop an intimate relationship with it, sustained by personal knowledge and by being in service to others. Celebrate your life today, and let others celebrate your death tomorrow, as they dance upon your grave with smiles and laughter in remembrance of you.
To be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise…people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil…this ignorance, which thinks that it knows what it does not, must surely be ignorance most culpable…
Socrates
