XII - DEATH

We all die sometime. Life is 100% fatal. Some of us die young, some die old, but we all go. Bodies just don’t last forever. Somehow in the face of that fact we have to make sense of it all, to find meaning in our lives, which are so short in the grand scheme of things.

When I die, what dies? The physical living organism that is my body dies, but is that I? Is that what I am? Is that all I am? One could argue that this is so, but people do not live that way. What they see most as themselves is their myth and their roles in it. Certainly at the death of the body one cannot continue to play one’s mythic role as when alive. In many ways the story comes to an end.

The prospect of one’s myth ceasing to exist, ending, disappearing, being forgotten, of no consequence at death terrifies most people. If the myth is just gone at death, then a lifetime of moral demonstration has been negated in an instant, and life could be seen as worthless.

People use a wide variety of beliefs and strategies to keep their myths going after death. There is reincarnation, which says you will be born again into a new myth, which, however, will have some connection to the old one. There is the belief in Heaven and Hell in which one’s myth is judged against an absolute standard and one has an eternal fate, a new myth to live, good or bad, determined by the quality of one’s earthly life, an extrapolation of one’s present myth. There are strategies for life, too. Great effort is spent in trying to be an alpha source for others, so that they may live according to your myth after you die. This and genetic immortality are two major reasons people have children. People feel a need to make physical contributions to the world, so that after they die, it will be a different place for their having lived and their myths will live on through their works. Mainly, though, they want to be remembered, for as we are our myths, if we are remembered, our stories live on.

Much of our desire for mythic immortality is driven by our fear of abandonment. Death is the ultimate abandonment. We all die alone. We may be surrounded by our near and dear as we lie dying, but the transition itself is solitary, a withdrawal from life and everything and everyone we know. Death, for each of us, is the end of our myth, at least in its present form.
What could help us overcome our fear of death, so we might live more freely and fully? How could we be less afraid to let go of our myth? One answer is to let every day be its own reward, worthwhile for its own sake. If you invest years of toil and stress and misery toward some future day when you will collect on it all, you will be more afraid of dying and being cheated out of your rightful reward. Your death would make you look like a sucker and that possibility keeps your present status in doubt and you in fear of that fate. The idea is to live so that if at any moment you were about to die, you could look at your life and see that your myth had been fulfilled and you had nothing to be sorry for.

Another way to deal with our fear of death is to remove the symbolism we attach to dying. Death is just the cessation of life, but since it is such a major event we load it down with extraneous meanings. We consider death a demonstration of failure, weakness, abandonment, proof of bad judgment, lack of alpha, divine punishment, and no end of other negative morals. No wonder we fear death. If we could just take some of the moral load off of dying, then we could live more at peace with our mortality. But most of us are not so enlightened, so we try for mythic immortality to counterbalance our physical mortality.

Funerals
This is a major reason we mark and identify burial sites. We have ceremonies for the dead, funerals, in which the moral demonstrations of the deceased are celebrated. His myth is given attention, and we say words to the effect of “and the moral of this story is _____.” But mythic continuity for the deceased is not the only reason for funerals.

They are more for the benefit of the living than for the dead. People will travel thousands of miles to go to funerals. They will go farther for a funeral than for a wedding or nearly anything else. Yet the deceased is gone and he is not coming back. A funeral is a gathering of a tribe defined by its relation to the deceased, a tribe that has lost its center. That tribe was defined by its relation to a myth whose owner is now dead and gone. This is a crisis point in the tribe’s existence. It is also a crisis point in the myths of all who knew him, for each has lost a mythic player. Each person’s myth was interacting with the deceased’s myth, and it can no longer do so in the same immediate way.

There is a shift in one’s relationship with everybody one knows when someone close and mythically important dies. Dominance and alpha source relationships, submission and alpha recipient relationships all must be redefined. A tribal gathering for a funeral helps this process get under way.

For all who had an alpha relationship with the deceased there is a need to see the deceased as morally noteworthy. If he was their alpha source, it validates their own myth’s moral validity since his myth is a source of theirs. If they were alpha sources for him, they want to confirm theirs was an exemplary product. This mythic confirmation is motivated by the need to celebrate and renew a myth which has been demolished and negated by death.

The deceased was a member of our tribe and shared our group myth. Praising the deceased is a way reaffirming the power of the group myth despite death’s taking one of our tribe. The loss makes us doubt the power of the group myth. Praise for the dead denies any moral demonstration that a deficient myth caused the death, so we can all feel safe.

Grief
Why do we grieve at death, especially a sudden, unexpected death of someone close to us? It seems natural and obvious that we would; those that do not react that way are often looked at with suspicion or worse. The first answer is that we grieve for the loss of a loved one. That is fine as far as it goes, but we can do better. We learn of the death. Very often the first reaction is denial “What? Not Susan! That can’t be!”

But then we find out that it really is so, no denying the fact. It feels like the bottom has dropped out of everything. Nothing has meaning anymore. We are under a great deal of stress. We either don’t want to do anything, or plunge ourselves into activity to distract ourselves. What has happened?

First, we have been abandoned by a major player in our myth. She’s gone and she’s not coming back. She was playing a big role in our moral demonstrations. Now that she is gone, they are in doubt—loss of meaning, loss of motive for action. Our dependence on the actions of another, the myth of another, the validation and confirmation from another, the morals she brought to our myth, everything she contributed to that which makes us social beings, has been ripped out from under us. Also, we grieve for the death of part of ourselves. If Susan has died, the character I was with her, the role I played with her, is also gone. I can no longer be that person I was with her, only who I am without her. Faced with such a loss within ourselves, what do we do now? Our myth seems in tatters, our world crashing down around us.

What we do is heal. We start living our life after—a new phase in our lives, with memory but not physical presence of the one gone. We reconstruct our myths piece by piece out of our new reckoning of the world and out of the experiences of one day at a time. It is never the same as before, but it can be good also. A certain sadness remains for what was and what could have been.

Survivor’s Benefits
Yet there are also benefits that appear, much as when a tree dies in the forest, it opens up sunlight for all plants in its shade. There is mythic competition with others, measuring ourselves, our worth, and our work against others. The death of another does much to end that competition and release us from being locked into a particular role. The role of another, the myth of another becomes vacated when its owner dies—we can grow into it. If I were the same as someone close to me while we both live, the need we each have to believe in the validity of our own myth would cause a competition too intense to be viable. So we make space for each other mythically—I do not try to have exactly your myth and you do not try to have mine. The differences in life experiences separate myths, too. But we form local mythic areas of jurisdiction with others near us, personality franchises. You or I may be seen by ourselves, each other, or the world as the smart one, the pretty one, the shy one, the clumsy one, the active one, the thoughtful one, the social one, etc. So as one excels in a particular role, that role is vacated by the other, so we become subsets of the possible human. We may be similar but we are always different. This process is very common and easy to see among siblings. Our dependence on a friend to be those things we are not causes much of our sense of loss at his death. Yet death can release these ways of being to us. The roles become available to us. We can become what we could not when the person was alive. Thus there exists the possibility that in significant ways we, in part, become who the deceased was, as the trees in the forest fill in where one has fallen. For example, the death of your alpha sources, those who had authority in your life, opens the way for you to become your own authority, to fully grow up, to come out from under their shadow.