In a recent moment of financial fretting, I found an Internet worksheet that promised to tell me how much money I'd need for my later years. "Before you begin," I read, "why not use our life expectancy calculator to determine how many years your savings will need to last." Life expectancy calculator? With a mixture of dread and fascination, I clicked.
Eight screens of lifestyle, diet, medical, and family history later, the computer delivered its verdict: 'Your life expectancy is 102 years." What? "The biggest factors you have going for you are your age, gender, and longevity of your forebears," the program informed me. "But what about all that fallout-laced snow I ate back in the fifties?" I wanted to ask. "Or those crazy drivers intent on plastering me to the pavement on dark rainy nights after choir?" The rational thinker in me was profoundly skeptical, and not at all sure I'd even want to live that long. The worrier was secretly pleased. 102 years might be a financial drain, but it could give me a whole lot of time to defer thinking about... you know what.
Then, on Ash Wednesday, our pastor suggested that Lent might be a very good time to think about exactly that. "You are going to die," he intoned, not once but several times, and as the solemn and moving service proceeded, it was impossible not to hear the echo of those words.
Going to Die
Unless we are faced with life-threatening crises, voluntary contemplation of our own death is a tall order. My first uncomfortable brush with the question came long ago, over coffee with a former rector. We were speaking of a dying parishioner. "I just don't know what I'd do if I had a terminal illness," I said, in my naive 25-year-old voice. He fixed me with a steady expression for several moments. "You do have a terminal illness," he stated.
Although John's words unnerved me, they did not strike with full force for another ten years, when I learned I had a benign condition which would eventually require major surgery. I was terrified of doctors. One night I got up and heard a loud voice in my head. It said, "You are going to die." As the icy chill of that voice wrapped itself around my heart, I knew for the first time that I was mortal. I knew I would die---not how, or when, but I knew. Worst of all, in that cold bathroom at 3 a.m., I felt trapped. There was no way out.
As always, when God raps hard on the door of our attention, I had a choice: run and hide, or open the door. Over the next weeks, I realized I had to face my life with all its fears, regrets, and emptiness. Gradually, I began a process which led me back to the church I had left. I still don't know how I would face the certain knowledge of my own, impending death, except that it would be easier now than 10 or 20 years ago. What I do know is that I am learning much about life.
Cry of Life
On Ash Wednesday, as I was going to the rail for communion, I walked past the prie-Dieu where we knelt to receive our ashes. There, on the back of the chair, was a small, round silver box, and in the bottom were the ashes, absolutely non-reflective. In the dim light, it was impossible to identify the dull grey substance, which, in contrast to the beautiful, shining silver encircling it, had no life whatsoever. "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Again I felt icy dread grip my heart.
But then I looked up. Despite the penitential feeling in the dark, silent church, there was a tense and palpable human energy. Silence magnified the light and life emanating from the kneeling forms, the solemn faces, the warm flesh beneath each smudged black cross on a forehead.
The French writer George Bataille pointed out the paradox that it is the lifeless body---which these ashes represent---that most clearly reveals the spirit that once filled it. "Death," he wrote, "is the great affirmer, the wonder-struck cry of life."
For Christians, death is a door which swings two ways, with life on either side. But the promise of Easter only arrives after the travail of Lent and Holy Week. In our time here on earth, we have been given the capacity to view each moment of life as a swinging door, from which we can consider the past and walk forward into a new beginning. The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki said, "If you had unlimited life, it would be a big problem for you."
While I may hope for a long life, I know perfectly well that I cannot count on it. Like Lent itself, each of our lives gives us reminders of our mortality, but it is up to us whether we chalk them up as lucky escapes or as opportunities to wake up and reflect upon the shining gift of each day of life---and how we want to live it.
Elizabeth Adams is a member of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hanover NH.
A box of ashes on Good Friday celebrates the paradox of death---reminder of our limits and mortality and, at the same time, a "wonder-struck cry of life."