POINTS OF VIEW AT HOME ON EARTH by Kyle Kramer
GIFTS OF MORTALITY To integrate an awareness of death into our life means a lot of things, most of them beyond the scope of this column and probably beyond my scope as a writer. But I’d like to focus on two things that I’ve found helpful and that have really affected how I live my life. 42 • May 2022 / StAnthonyMessenger.org
The first gift of facing mortality is perspective. I’ve worked alongside vowed religious for my entire career, and I’ve come to admire deeply their practice of memento mori: intentionally recalling, every day, that you will die, that your time on earth is the briefest of moments against the backdrop of eternity. Contrary to what you might think, this doesn’t lead the monastics I know to be morbid and resigned. If anything, it grounds them in gratitude for the precious time they do have. It offers them a strong dose of humility about their own accomplishments relative to the vast scale of deep time. It gives them an acute awareness of their connectedness to the great cloud of witnesses, who began their order’s work before them and will continue it long after they are gone. Such a perspective isn’t unique to monastic communities. In my family, my mom has lived for many years with incurable cancer. That has been difficult, but it has also given us an amazing gift of cherishing the time we have together, however long or short it ends up being. And it’s a small step from cherishing an all-too-brief human life (our own or that of someone we care about) to cherishing all life within our common home. Another gift of facing mortality is the opportunity to become very intentional about our habits. If our lives really are so brief, don’t we want to spend them in the best way possible, focused on the most important things? And isn’t a well-lived life largely the aggregation of our daily choices and habits? As the writer Annie Dillard pointed out, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
MARILYN NIEVES/ISTOCK; BOTTOM: COURTESY OF KYLE KRAMER
IF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC has offered us anything along the lines of hard-won wisdom, it’s a renewed sense of our own mortality. I’d bet that anyone reading this has lost someone you cared about to this virus, or you know someone who has. As I’ve reflected on this, I keep coming back to one of the fundamental paradoxes of American culture. On the one hand, we do almost anything to avoid confronting mortality. We fear death and decay, and so we shun it, instead valuing youthfulness and often disregarding our elders, lest they remind us that, sooner or later, the bell will toll for us too. Yet at the very same time, so many of us live in ways that create ill health and harm for ourselves, for those on the margins, and for so many creatures in the more-than-human world. In some cosmic irony, denying death simply gives it that much more power. As we begin to integrate the lessons of the pandemic, we have an amazing opportunity to flip this paradox on its head. I believe that if we can acknowledge mortality in wise and healthy ways, this will be tremendously life-giving, for us as individuals and as a society. We must give death its rightful place at the table of our life.
HISPANOLISTIC/ISTOCK
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
