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This essay was hijacked; ripped right away from me as I wrote it. This essay was supposed to have been about listening to ancestors, spirits and even deities. I started to write when I visited a web site with a podcast and, in one of the drop-down menus was the selection of “How to Listen,” and I thought that was important.
But, the veil may be pulling away thinner and faster than in other years, and so the hijacking started. The little signs appeared, whispers, finding old photos, news and texts all distracting me in different directions. This is not helpful as you try to focus. Information on the radio. The chatter of ancestors and spirit. Finally, a phone survey about dying.
Seriously, for whoever is listening, was yet another phone survey really necessary? Apparently so, because I wasn’t getting enough of them living in a big-prize political battleground state.
Dulle Griet by Pieter Bruegel the Elder [Public Domain]
I was a doctoral student at the time, taking courses in advanced immunology as part of rotations in our medical school for statistical training. In one particular course on virus-host interactions, it was mathematically clear to me that my partner’s chances for managing the disease were slim at best. There was simply too much on the scales tipping them in the direction of death.
Luckily, I didn’t have to broach the death conversation. He laid it out straightforwardly. He detailed with exceptional precision the conditions under which he would take his own life, or expected the plug to be pulled.
To complicate matters, or perhaps reinforce them, he was a pharmacist. He had the full American pharmacopeia literally at his fingertips. He had already acquired the necessary cocktail should what he called the “exit circumstances” ever occur.
He was also a Christian, and was well resigned that he was going to purgatory. He had accepted that the sum of sins in his life were potentially forgivable, but his soul would — and as he would argue should — remain unclean and barred from entering heaven until his transgressions were expunged. He believed — like many in the Abrahamic faiths– that we are the stewards, but not owners, of our lives. And euthanasia, in the human context, is suicide, an essential contradiction of a life-affirming plan laid out by the Abrahamic god at the time of creation.
He was also worried about complicity. Those who might voluntarily cooperate if and when he took his own life, would also expose themselves to serious sin. Failing to intervene, or even waiting until no rescue was possible, was a contravening behavior to proactively seeking and sustaining life. Therefor, all of those around him, who knew of his plan, were at risk of corruption, and thus condemned to atone for their sins. Some of which also required a stay in purgatory. At least that’s what he thought.
To be clear, though, he wasn’t particularly worried about me; I was already going to hell. You know, the witch thing. Ultimately, the disease took his mind long before he could execute any plan. The sin, in his faith, was the thought, not that action. When his body succumbed it was from disease, not planning.
My godmother died at about the same time. She was loud, loving and irritating with a special penchant to test new recruits to our Ile, our “house,” the immediate spiritual community in Lukumi. This became especially true in the last decade of her life as her health problems started to gain prominence. She would lecture to potential members of her house and then start to complain that she wasn’t feeling well and that her back was acting up again. Then a few moments later she would say, “well, that’s that, time to” do ____” — some mildly strenuous yet wholly-inappropriate chore that she shouldn’t be doing in the first place, such as mowing the lawn. (Well, she’d say it, but in Spanish).
Inevitably, one potential member would unwaveringly come to her assistance. Then she would pull a Norma Desmond for dramatic attention to her health, but reject the help sternly, noting, “Thank you, but I don’t want your help.”
They would go to help anyway. And she would do some part of the work, shaking her head in disappointment. Others would come and in just a few minutes, what would have taken her a couple of hours to complete, was done by a group of well-meaning helpers. Then, when the task was done, she would ice the room into paralysis: “I can’t learn what I need if I’m not allowed to try but more importantly, I can teach you nothing if you refuse to listen.”
It was a comment that was met with anger and confusion, but it was also true. Embedded in that comment was single call to action that often escaped the person listening to it: Trust me that I’m telling you the truth.
![[Photo Credit: Brandon Godfrey / Wikimedia]](https://wildhunt.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Ross_Bay_Cemetery_Fall_colors_1-500x334.jpg)
[Photo Credit: Brandon Godfrey / Wikimedia]
She didn’t need to be rescued from her own truth.
What my ex and my godmother were each demanding was agency, and it is this agency, an essence of self-determination, that sits as an important value in our community. It is also the easiest thing to take from those who are frail, chief among them the ill and dying. They have the least power and offer the least resistance. At the same time, they induce some of the greatest challenges in our lives.
At this time, we lack not only a substantive theological architecture about death and dying, but also an urgency to engage in that dialogue. As we involve ourselves in discussing and describing these difficult topics from a faith orientation, we not only build our theological infrastructure around them, but we also build interfaith respect showing that we are prepared to address difficult questions of life, living and dying. We convey that we can collectively offer faith-centered answers and support during critical stages in peoples’ lives. And this is a moment and a topic in which we can lead a truly national, even international, dialogue.
In general, it is safe to say that Pagans value life: our community is ebullient with life-affirming and joy-affirming events, texts and behaviors. They are ubiquitous. I think we also deeply value the fabric that nature has built over eons, and recognizing that life requires death. And while we have commissions that protect life, such as “harm none” (a statement shared by the Hippocratic oath), the Wheel of the Year, for many of us, embeds in our communities and our consciousness, a clear marking of time to honor the deceased. The wheel teaches us to take the time to reflect on death as a necessary passing. Through that, the Pagan relationship with death deviates considerably from the views of most major faiths. Life and death form a continuum over which spirit exists.
In the Yoruba religion, for example, the ancestors are intimately present. They are revered because it is their work, their sacrifice, and their love that brought each of us to the present. They are accessible through divination and our skills at mediumship. Working with ancestors is more than encouraged; it is required. It is devotional practice on a daily basis. Death is part of existence; and it is through that interwoven doorway between all worlds that we can call the living to the world of the departed.
We are encouraged to converse. This conversation with ancestors is opened by Orisha Oyá. She is the first breath of life and the last breath before death. She is close to death but not death itself. She is the Orisha that must witness every act of dying and her wind releases the spirit into eternity. She guards the cemetery gates, but not the cemetery itself. She represents the transition, opening the space from the living to to the dead. It is a view that is not dissimilar from many Pagan traditions.
As you might imagine, however, I am a proponent of voluntary euthanasia for those with incurable and terminal illness. There is nothing incompatible with affirming life while validating agency. In fact, I believe that freedom represents the most powerful testament that we have of our commitment to self-determination; what medical ethicists might refer to as autonomy, or the supremacy of a patient’s wishes over the desires of their caretakers and providers. The discourses around lessening suffering should be subordinate to this type of agency, but I have to leave the intricacies of that argument to the many gifted theologians of our community.
As the veil does thin, it is an opportunity to discuss the light and the dark, including how we might hail and transcend the more difficult and emotional moments of our time in life. These conversations can only strengthen our respect for the moment and the immanence of the spirit. Our dialogue cannot diminish the fires and fervor for life nor can they hasten or glorify a desire for death, but they can help us to better understand and cope with it. Even when we know the bus and the time, death will always remain sudden no matter how expected.
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Well said.
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