After ‘Mister Death’ calls!

Jul 17, 2016 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

There are some topics that one feels uneasy writing about, but need to. This is one. Death is an old foe with many faces. It’s the rhetorical question that answers itself with crushing finality. It evades our best efforts to define it. We use its name frivolously, but many of us refuse to think about it – I mean really think, except maybe when there are unmistakable signs that a loved one is about to ‘cross over.’ And if truth be told, most of us fear, hate, and respect it in equal measure.

I have an unnerving habit of trying to put myself in the place of someone facing this final earthly ‘event’, particularly when not anticipated. Like when the fatality of a sudden heart attack is obviously just a matter of time, or after a falling tree crushes you into the muddy earth and you know with terrifying certainty, ‘This is it!’

I have boundless curiousity about what happens after our physical body stops responding to external stimuli and internal control. Descartes’ Cogito Ergo Sum comes to mind, so when ‘cogito’ goes does ‘sum’ follow?

Mister Death stalks our land, and has become so common-place, so arbitrary, that we tend to overlook his finality, or we choose to. We don’t want to think of a man’s thoughts and feelings as a bullet explodes inside his head, or as an end-stage cancer patient fights to breathe, or as an elderly couple is about to be overcome by smoke and flames inside a locked, barred room.

Would we have time to reflect on the words of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (“Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear; seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come”) or ponder Hamlet’s more reasoned ‘To be or not to be, that’s the question …”

It’s great reading such timeless words of literary and philosophical value, but when Mister Death calls, as The Mighty Kaieteur sang in ‘Drunk Man’ and we have to answer, what then?

‘Death is at the centre of life.’ These words and their significance have been spoken and implied by poets, philosophers, doctors, etc. The first funeral I remember attending, as a very young child, was that of a family friend who had died in childbirth shortly after marriage. She was buried in her wedding dress, virginal white, with the child still in her womb, and I guess a subliminal connection was made in my mind between those two existential themes in the pall-like ambience of Lyken’s Funeral Parlour.

The enigma of death intrigued me in my youth; now its reality is less alluring and more daunting to my soul. Nevertheless I am mesmerized by the inability of us humans to fathom what is on the other side of it beyond speculation, religious teaching, and paranormal experience.

We know the physical phenomenon – the reality of a body without life decomposing to dust. And we understand, or try to grasp the idea that somehow an immaterial part of each of us survives death and goes to a place of indescribable grandeur, inescapable horror, or some other dimension of being.

Many of us console ourselves, or are comforted by sympathizers, with the common Christian notion of our loved ones looking down on us, smiling in beatific enlightenment from a place beyond the blue. (From martyrs to murderers, ordinary Joes and Janes are eulogized and glamourized to the point of absurdity, so that could they listen in, many wouldn’t recognize themselves.)

My mother loved to good-naturedly scare us, her children, with stories about spirits of the dead, and promised to let me know what was on the other side after she got there. It’s been almost 45 years and I’m still waiting. Others are not so ‘lucky’ and stories of ghosts and hauntings are legendary. Right now on the Essequibo Coast I’m having fun debating with a couple of kids from Dartmouth the question of spirits, jumbies, and baccoos. They speak about the existence of these entities with the artless certainty that only children possess. Guess who’s losing the debate?

So, do our loved (or hated) ones have the power to understand what has happened to them after death, along with the ability to communicate with, protect, comfort and scare the living? The bible appears to offer contradictory ideas about whether or not the dead are conscious. It seems to imply that death is followed by a continued existence of the soul in heaven or hell; yet states that it is a deep sleep undisturbed by any kind of awareness until the second coming of Jesus Christ.

I am more inclined to go with the sleep-until-resurrection idea partly because it makes more sense to me and partly because the bible seems to imply it more strongly. It says that when someone dies his thoughts perish, (Psalm 146) he knows not anything, (Ecclesiastes 9) he does not praise the Lord, (Psalm 115) he is in the grave until he hears God’s voice, (John 5) he is not raised from his sleep until the heavens are no more, (Job 14) he rises only when Jesus returns at the last trumpet call. (1 Thessalonians 4)

But what about the Apostle Paul observing that ‘to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, (2 Corinthians 5) Jesus’ words to the thief on the cross implying that they both would be in Paradise that day, (Luke 23) and the conversation between the rich man and Father Abraham across the gulf separating Heaven and Hell? (Luke 16)

Then there are the near-death experiences of hundreds of dying patients, and the purported sightings and communication from the beloved departed. They all appear to point to the immortality of some immaterial part of us that can, after death, get in touch with the living.

Of course there are still many scientists and atheists who claim both ideas are bunk; that God doesn’t exist, that religion is a myth, and that death is indeed the end. But now, believe it, there are yet others including scientists and medical researchers who now strongly suggest that the human soul/spirit is indestructible energy that simply cannot die or be extinguished.

So what is the truth? In the end we may just continue fearing, hating, embracing, or simply acknowledging the ‘reality’ of that most mysterious of human experiences.

I end with this brief perplexity. One night just before Christmas Day 1972, I woke up around midnight to the sound of water running from a tap in the kitchen of our South Road home. It was in full flow. So was the bathroom tap. I turned off both, but the sound continued. I went to a front window and looked down into the yard only to see the yard pipe gushing. Weird, I thought. Then I sensed it, or imagined that I did; the presence of my father who always reminded us to ensure all the taps were off before we went to bed. I smiled as I imagined him looking up at me and wagging his finger. There was no fear.

And I imagined him smiling wryly in return – my prudent, caring father. Then I remembered what day it was, and my spine tingled for a moment. It was December 21st; exactly one year after he had passed away in the room just a few feet from where I stood. Mere coincidence?

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