PSYCHOSCAPES: Disability and Death: Perhaps not the End but the Beginning

CC Jean Stimmell: 2017

I never considered myself to be handicapped until recently, after listening to a podcast on disability theory. After all, I wasn’t in a wheelchair. It never dawned on me that I, along with my fellow aging baby boomers, are already handicapped – despite the indisputable evidence that our minds are slowing down, leaking memories like a sieve, while our bodies are disintegrating like cars in a demolition derby.

That’s why, according to disability theory, old age itself is a disability.

Like most of us, I am in denial, resisting the notion that I’m going downhill and will someday die. It’s hard to be old in a country obsessed with being young. In our consumer society, a whole industry has sprung up to sell us stuff to keep us forever in our prime – or so they claim. They know they have to work fast to cash in before we go belly up.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow to admit old age is a progressive disability with death as the end result. But it is also a wake-up call to remind us of the task ahead. As James Hillman, the prominent Jungian psychologist, tells us, our mission in old age shifts from self-preservation to finding meaning in our lives.

"The old have gravitas when their insight reaches into the invisible core of things, into what is hidden and buried," he writes. "When the body begins to sag, it is abandoning sham and hypocrisy. The body leads the way down, deepening your character."^⁠1

John Donne proclaimed the same message preaching from the pulpit back in the 17^th century: “Death — the looming fact of it, its finality and clarifying power — calls us to attention and wakes us up to life.^⁠2” That’s also the core belief of Buddhism: Death is seen not as a downhill slide but as a final stage of growth.

Frank Ostaseski, a Buddhist teacher and visionary cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project, writes that we gain wisdom and compassion by facing death. In doing so, we discover the crux of what we share in common with our fellow human beings: the absolute uncertainty of our lives: “We become aware of the fundamental truth that everything comes and goes: every thought, every lovemaking, every life. We see that dying is in the life of everything.”^⁠3

Resisting this truth leads to pain. One might think that I had long ago accepted the reality of my mortality from so many close brushes with death from a wild and crazy youth, Vietnam combat, and four cancers. But that is not the case. I still live in a blissful state of denial unless I purposely force myself to focus on my end – which is what I’m doing right now by writing this essay.

Some Buddhists encourage this exercise by doing various graphic visualizations such as: meditating on their own body in a coffin being consumed by worms, meditating in front of a dead body, or carrying around a picture of a corpse to constantly remind them that death is real.

While doing research for this column, I discovered an intriguing alternative to corpse meditations: A Green Burial on my own land. Not only does it force me to attend to what’s to come, it does so in a restorative and spiritual way.

To convey what I'm imagining would happen if I were buried cozily on my beloved land, I can do no better than paraphrase the poetic words of Casey Lyons, taken from the current edition of Orion Magazine:

“The poisons inside my body will be neutralized by the fungi and I will travel through mycelium to roots in a sprawling, if poorly understood, exchange that underwrites life. My edges will become blurry, then meaningless, as mushrooms reorganizes my body toward life again. Then I’ll push back into the sunlight on my land where I was happiest, maybe as a leaf or an insect, soil or bird, snake or rabbit. In practically no time, I will be gone and yet everywhere. Joined. Connected. Safe.”^⁠4

I used to envy deeply religious folks who were confident that their death wasn't the end but the beginning as they were ushered into everlasting life. Now, It looks like I can have that assurance, too.

xxx

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