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This week Scott and I attended funerals for two family members.
My uncle, the youngest of my mom’s siblings, died after a complicated battle with a decades-long illness. Scott’s great aunt died from the ravages of dementia.
Before they died, neither of them appeared to be the people they once were when we ate with them, worked with them, laughed with them, cried with them and celebrated holidays with them.
Their illnesses had stolen their identities from them and left them a shell of who they used to be.
But at both visitations, I was struck by how close they looked to the people I once knew, despite their spirits having left their bodies.
This is an eerie experience we all have, to see the lifeless body of someone we lived with and loved at their viewing.
I remember when I first saw my dad’s body in his casket at his viewing. He looked like my dad, and he was dressed like my dad.
But my dad wasn’t there.
The man that had the gift of spreading a contagion of laughter around the room when he belly laughed at his own jokes was gone. Just like that. Forever.
It is a strange mystery with which we must grapple to one day have someone among us filled with the breath of life and the next to have them disappear permanently from our lives.
To wonder where they have gone. And to know a real hollowness in our own hearts where they once lived.
When someone dies, especially someone close to us, a part of us dies with them. We are never the same.
Attending even one funeral can force us into some real soul searching. Two funerals in the same week intensifies that experience.
Suddenly, we are reminded of the ephemeral nature of life. St. James minces no words:
“Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.” (James 4:14)
The soul searching we do after a death might make us ask ourselves: Who am I? What have I done with my life? What do I yet want to do? Are there any areas of my life I would like to improve? Do I have anyone in my life to whom I owe amends? Does my life have any cosmic meaning and purpose?
We avoid these questions to our own detriment.
No one wants to think about dying, but death educators tell us the best way to deal with our own death is to acknowledge its reality while we are still healthy and full of life.
Some even use these words: make friends with your own death.
Accept that you are going to die, and begin now dealing with your conflicting feelings about it. What am I afraid of? Why am I afraid of it? Will I go somewhere after I die? Will I finally be reunited with long-gone family and friends?
If we do even minimal introspection, we are aware on some level of a spiritual consciousness that animates us. Through that spiritual consciousness, we experience the best and worst life has to offer.
By experiencing things like beauty, love, birth and death throughout the years of our lives, we come to know and believe in something greater than us. We come to recognize that we had nothing to do with our existence coming into being, and ultimately what happens after we die is a mystery, as well.
Even though we struggle with fear and uncertainty, a deep part of us believes that immortal spiritual consciousness through which we experience life on this plane will somehow continue when we draw our last breath.
Whether that is true or not – and I have had many personal experiences to make me believe our loved ones do indeed live on – we can use the time we have now, today, in this moment, to live our lives as fully as possible, with grace, dignity and humanity.
Because how we live our lives ultimately informs how we die.
SPIRIT MATTERS is a weekly column by Jerrilyn Zavada Novak that examines experiences common to the human spirit. Contact her at jzblue33@yahoo.com.