Thanatological Thoughts

I have never seen a person die.

I am afraid of death by asphyxiation (e.g. drowning, suffocation).

If I die by natural causes, then I believe I will most likely die in the month of February, in the middle of the week, late in the evening.

The earliest memory I have is of being carried on my father's shoulders up the stairs from the basement to the upper stories of our house as it was being built in 1978. The memory is distant like a dream, but as I recall it hazily, I remember sensing that if my father let go of me, I would be badly hurt. Surrounded by strangers and dust and noise and potent odors, my life depended on hanging on to my father.

My most memorable birthday was my eighth, in 1985, when a hurricane devastated the Eastern Seaboard, drowned 16 persons, and left my family powerless for a week. My next most memorable birthday was my 24th, in 2001, because only when it arrived did I begin to stop being afraid after the terror of Sept. 11.

Somewhere in my childhood, around or before the age of ten, I became able to imagine nothingness, the end of my own existence, and eternal unconsciousness. Those imaginings worried me then, and they still do sometimes. This can be a good thing: "There are few things as convincing as death to remind us of the quality with which we live our life" (Robert Fripp).

Both of my grandfathers died in December, one in 1991 and the other in 1994.

Seeing my grandmother choke on a sandwich on the day after Thanksgiving in 1998, with none of us able to give her aid, waiting powerlessly for the paramedics, was one of the most frightening moments in my life.

I still worry about whether I was exposed to asbestos fibers when I was working ten years ago in an office building in midtown Manhattan.

When Timothy McVeigh was executed on June 11, 2001, I cried, and on that day I stopped believing in the death penalty. "For everything that lives is holy" (William Blake).

One birthday I was given a dwarf cactus. I tended it poorly, and it died from overwatering. I felt great remorse over this.

The first wedding I ever attended was my sister's on July 29, 2006. She asked me to read Scripture and offer some homiletic reflections. She objected to my quotation of the Scripture that says love is stronger than death.

The last funeral I attended was for Fr. Ed Boyle, founder of the Massachusetts Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, in November 2007. The last wake I attended was for Norman McReynolds, a member of Common Cathedral, last spring. The last memorial I attended was for the Rev. Dr. James Nash, a former faculty member of Boston University School of Theology, in December.

Unlike some Catholics, I felt no distress upon hearing that when the plot of Cardinal John Henry Newman was excavated last October, no body was found in the grave, the only things recovered being the cloth of his biretta, and a brass coffin plate.

Walking through graveyards leaves me feeling strangely fatigued.

I wonder if I have it in me to be a martyr, to be like those of whom it is written that love for life did not deter them from death.

You must hear Led Zeppelin's take on "In My Time of Dying," a blues traditional pushed into postmodern times.

To my ears, hackneyed phrases like "to die for" and "I could just die" are not only indecent but also blasphemous. The same for cheap curses like "drop dead."

For me, the most colorful personification of Death is not the Grim Reaper but a much lesser known figure called the Supernatural Anaesthetist.

If given the opportunity to have a simulated near-death experience, whether induced chemically or by suggestion, I would decline.

I am not so much saddened by a loved one's death as saddened by the grief others show. It is a sympathy sadness.

I am going to find it very difficult to respect my mother's wish to be cremated.

My only monument will be dust and ashes, and it will commemorate the resurrection.

I do not know who will bury me. I know who will raise me.

"Not even death can end the process of our becoming" (Robert Fripp).