Death Is a Stranger

I

AT what particular point in the long journey from cell to man did the race first gain that awareness which is one important difference between humanity and the ‘little brotherhood’ of the Lower animals — the consciousness of the personal quality of death? Animals recognize death when they see it, but, so far as I know, man is the only being that perceives it in its relation to himself — and even in man this recognition is very often vague and illdefined.

I suppose humanity grew gradually into this knowledge as most individuals mercifully must. Otherwise I should think the sudden discovery that your own death was far more inevitable than anything else in your life would render that life completely null.

For my own part I cannot remember how I came to know about death either objectively or subjectively, but it must have been at a very early age, for among my first recollections are memories of lying awake at night vaguely trying to comprehend the full meaning of eternity, and endeavoring to imagine some form of life after death which could be considered eternally endurable, let alone desirable. By the time I was eight, I had discarded the harps and halos of heaven, and from recognizing that the orthodox heaven would be a good deal less interesting than the orthodox hell I progressed to a recognition of the fact that, if eternity really meant what its name implied, any kind of life would eventually become unendurably monotonous. I then considered the possibility of there being no after life, and found my recoil from the idea of annihilation greater and more instinctive than my dislike for the unpleasant connotations of immortality.

I do not think that I was a morbid child, for there were weeks when death did not come into my mind at all, but whenever I began to think, my mind always returned to the problem, which seemed not so much to be insoluble as to present no desirable solution. From the consideration of death in the abstract I began to consider death in the concrete — my own death first, of course, and then the death of others. I was then, and am still, afraid of death

— though not of the mere act of dying, which I imagine will not much differ from other experiences of pain and unconsciousness. But if there is no life after death, then I abhor the waste involved in the destruction of a spirit so arduously schooled by life; and if there is life after death, then I dread the complete and utter change which it seems bound to bring. However, the fear of my own death — though the recklessness of which I have occasionally been accused comes from my determination not to let this fear get the better of me

— does not worry me or shadow my life. The death that I really do dread unspeakably is the death of people I love.

I cannot remember the time when I have not been haunted by this fear — so much so that, very young, I developed the mental habit (I wonder if it is shared) of classifying all human relationships according to the grief I should feel at the death of the individual.

II

For years I was afraid to face the moment when I should see the person turn into the thing; but when the time actually came I stood calmly at the foot of the deathbed drying breakfast dishes as I waited for the dying girl’s harsh breathing to stop. Beside her sat Kitty Tandy, — dear Kitty, herself now dead, — tears streaming down her face and her hand clasped in the dying hand.

It was during the influenza epidemic of 1918, and Kitty, the young but extremely capable representative of the Home Service Branch of the Red Cross, had promised the dying girl’s sister, who had to return to the job that was going to pay the funeral expenses, that Lucy should not die alone.

Nothing about the scene seemed real to me: not Kitty with her tears, nor the purple face on the pillow, nor myself — nothing except the dishes. I was drying them because the eleven others in our tiny emergency hospital would presently need their lunch regardless of who lived or died, and our dishes were too few to allow any dishwashing to be skipped. I dried cups and saucers, bowls and spoons, going into our makeshift kitchen not ten feet from Lucy’s army cot and hurrying out again with another handful of crockery, because my presence at the foot of the bed loosened the tension for Kitty. I was washing out the cocoa kettle when Kitty called me. The harsh breathing had stopped. Together we stood by the bed and looked down at the girl, younger than either of us. Her disfigured face was peaceful for the first time since she had been brought to us three days before.

‘When you think what she would have had to face if she had lived, you can’t feel really sorry,’ said Kitty. I shared Kitty’s knowledge of her sad, all too common little story, and yet, as much as I felt anything, I felt a vague pity for Lucy. No matter that she was safe from the shame and the heartache which, as far as we could tell, she had no chance of avoiding, no matter what unearthly peace or what strange beauty was now hers, she had lost the homely comfort, the reassuring everydayness of our world. . . . Kitty called the undertaker and I finished the dishes.

The next month is more dreamlike than any other part of my life. The history of the influenza epidemic of 1918 has as yet been too much overshadowed by the tremendous background of the war to have been adequately depicted. Our own emergency hospital for women relatives of soldiers was of necessity inadequately equipped, and, since the nursing staff were inexperienced volunteers, for a time lost as many patients as it saved. Two Red Cross nurses worked eighteen to twenty hours a day, — and never lost their tempers! — but they had the entire civilian sanitary district to look after as well as our little hospital. Kitty’s hands were more than full taking care of the children of sick mothers and making arrangements for the dead. The burden of responsibility fell on me — and I had never even seen a seriously ill person, and possessed no special aptitude for nursing. We all did our best, — which in too many cases was not good enough, — and one would naturally think that once and for all I should have learned to know death then.

But, as I have already said, the month in the emergency hospital stands out like a dream only. I remember what happened, but only objectively — as if I had read about it. I know that over and over again I saw people die. I remember particularly one pretty girl. She was brought in at ten o’clock one morning, laughing and joking about coming to the hospital for a touch of flu. I remember that at three that afternoon, when I took her temperature and found it 106, she was looking past me at some imaginary tennis court on which she was playing a game. I remember that when Kitty came in at supper time, to see if she was so ill that her parents should be notified, we found that she was dead. I remember amusing a convalescent little girl of four so that her attention should be distracted from the undertaker and a soldier, husband of one of our other patients, who were lifting her mother’s body through the window behind her cot. But none of the horror and the tragedy pierced to the citadel where one really lives. I had no time to think or to feel, nor did I want to do either. Impossible as it seems, death was still an abstraction and a stranger.

The war spared not only my brother, but even my best friends, and, though my life was profoundly altered by it, the alteration was not due to any death connected with it, but to my marriage. For a time thereafter that inner attention which is the core of every life was diverted from its old preoccupation. I was too much interested in life to think about death. And then, as I suppose must often happen, death struck.

III

Now, if for some forty years death is to you merely an academic term, and if you then encounter it in its most sudden and premature form in connection with the person whom you most love, you will find that, for some time at least, it completely changes the current — even the very channel — of your thought. Before you can go on with life, you must come to some sort of compromise with death. To arrive at such a compromise should not be so hard as for many of us it undoubtedly is. The ability to adjust oneself to the commonplaces of life ought to be as instinctive to all as it is to the fortunate few. Since death and birth are both intrinsically everyday matters, surely death no more than birth should possess the power to shake the soul.

For more than two years the attempt to make such an adjustment has occupied my profound inner attention. Even yet I cannot be sure that death is to me anything but a tiger lurking in the jungle of life, to be dreaded not so much for ourselves as for those we love, the dear few whose presence in our lives gives them whatever savor they may have. I do, however, perceive that this feeling is artificial — that it is the result of circumstances rather than of qualities inherent in the thing itself.

Because many of the letters brought me by the publication¹ of ‘All Sweet Things’ indicate that my feeling about death is shared by numbers of my contemporaries, it seems to me perhaps worth while to describe the tentative conclusions at which I have arrived, and the steps by which I have reached them.

When I realized that the thought of death, which had haunted my childhood, but which for many years I had neglected to face, would now forever and most poignantly company my nights and days, my first sensation was one of despair. How does one set out to overcome despair? The method differs with the individual. I read. I had always read widely; now I read inordinately. Every moment not devoted to the sketchiest of housekeeping was filled with reading — newspapers, magazines, novels, history, psychology, science, economics, religion, everything except poetry. At first I read to keep from thinking; but so much of what I read was so evocative of thought that I soon realized the uselessness — not to say the cowardice — of trying to evade it. Then I decided to read everything I could find which dealt with the unrelenting fact that I was facing.

I read the New Testament and many books which attempt, more or less successfully, to interpret Christianity in terms of everyday existence. I read theosophy, spiritualism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism, and as I read I perceived that death is at once the centre and the stumblingblock of all religions. Their ethical teachings are practically the same; their principal difference lies in their conception of death — and these very differences in their attitude toward death, in the face of the unanimity of their ethics, serve to weaken the validity of any one belief.

Next I saw that death is the most significant constituent not only of religion but of life — not our own death, necessarily (for, whatever death may or may not do to us, it must certainly resolve our own immediate problems), but the death of those close to us, whose loss often infinitely complicates our lives as well as saddens them. No one who is not prepared to face death — his own or another’s — is prepared to face life.

To judge from the books of an earlier generation, it strikes me that we of to-day are less prepared for death than were our predecessors. Our mounting suicide totals may seem to give this statement the lie, but the increase in suicide, and in crime as well, indicates to me a lessening ability to assign the various factors of our lives their proper value.

In the last analysis, crime and suicide are only attempts to shirk facing disagreeable elements in the lives of the people who resort to them. This unwillingness to face the painful or unpleasant may be part of a general weakening of fibre of which our reluctance to face death is only a symptom; but, whatever the exact reason, it seems clear to me that even thirty years ago the conception of death did not involve the terror and the despair which now seem inextricably commingled with it.

To-day our minds instinctively turn away from the entire idea, refusing to contemplate either the physical fact or the spiritual implications. The reason for this instinctive rejection is probably twofold: we refuse to consider the spiritual implications because of our slipping hold on a religion founded on the premise that Jesus has conquered death and all its terrors; we shudder at the physical aspect because of the undeniable fact that death to most of us is a stranger. But though it may not be possible for us to regain the comfort of a religion, we can at least learn to look death steadfastly in the face, without fear if without hope.

IV

Statistics tell us that neither birth nor death is the commonplace it used to be. Not that death actually occurs less often than it did, but our customs concerning it have altered greatly. The very fact that nowadays the greater proportion of deaths take place in the hospital does a good deal to render it a stranger. There is less of the neighbors’ sitting up with the sick than there used to be, and the gathering of the family around the deathbed is not nearly so common. But, more than our hospitalization of the sick, our modern funeral customs have tended to turn a great commonplace into something so strange as to seem terrible.

Formerly, when the spirit had passed to its own place, the family, aided by the neighbors (and how clearly friendship shone at such a time!), took charge of the body, themselves performing the last offices. There were then, it seems to me, a simplicity, an affection, a journeying together to the parting of the ways, which are utterly lacking now that the disposal of the dead is a business or a profession. In hospital or at home, the doctor has hardly pronounced life extinct before the undertaker’s brisk young men are at the door. The mortician will attend to all the details. The survivors are effectually spared everything — except thought. Death in a hospital room, surrounded by the glittering inhuman appliances of science and the impersonal hospital routine. Our dead, now no longer and never again ours, snatched away to undergo the uncanny rites of the mortician — how can it be anything but terrible?

Years ago, while I was visiting a small West Virginia coal camp, a baby girl died. Friends contributed the clothes she was buried in, and, because the mother had always hoped to see her little daughter in a white dress with blue bows, those friends, at considerable cost to themselves in that lean and hungry place, bought a whole bolt of narrow blue ribbon. As a compliment to me, a ’ furriner,’ they asked me to make the bows. I am naturally awkward at anything of that kind, but it was impossible to refuse even if I had wanted to, and I have seldom so labored to so little avail. At last, however, I achieved four, and the dress was adorned. For the last time the mother washed her baby and dressed her. The father and his friends made a little coffin of dry-goods-box boards, lining it with a white petticoat. Loving hands dug the grave, and in the presence of the entire camp the baby was buried.

The occasion was sad, but not terrible and not agonizing. Death to that poverty-stricken coal camp and to those simple people was no stranger. Because he was a part of their lives, because they literally dwelt in his shadow, they accepted him with sorrow but without despair, and their inner lives were not thrown out of adjustment.

Long afterward my own baby girl was killed. I left her in the emergency room of the hospital. When I saw her next, and for the last time, she lay before the altar of the undertaker’s chapel. The undertaker himself, a kindly soul, and in private life a jolly one, was arranging chairs and tiptoeing up the aisle with flowers. His woman assistant was sorting cards and listing names, explaining to me as she did so that the funeral included ’thank you’ cards to be sent out after everything was over. Flowers heaped the chancel steps. The arrangements were dignified and the professionals were unobtrusively sympathetic. Nevertheless, as I stood before the white satin-lined coffin where lay my baby, dressed for the first time by strange hands, my mind flashed to that other baby’s funeral, and I would have given much for the poor comfort of having myself performed the last offices for my child. But death was a stranger and I did not know how to meet him.

V

The modem funeral defeats its own ends. It is, I suppose, intended to be the final expression of affection for the dead, and, through the tremendous promises of the funeral service, a reassurance for the living. But do not the very pomp and ceremony with which we surround death render it more terrible? If our love were greater than our fear, surely we should ourselves prefer to take charge of the bodies of our loved dead rather than at the last to turn them over to strange and perhaps ungentle hands. If we did so take care of them, death might, in losing its strangeness, lose half its terror.

For, after all, our dread of death is partly the child’s terror of the unknown. If we knew more about it, if, even, we faced it fairly, we might conceivably find it kinder than our best hopes; we should at least find it natural. And we are more nearly able to make terms with it in its presence, to meet it on its own ground, than to shove even the idea away from us, only to have it constantly recur, to have the fear of it — again not for ourselves, but for others — eternally in our hearts. The people who seated a skeleton at their feasts may have done so not so much to remind the feasters that life is short as to familiarize them with the idea of death. If we could once lay firm hold on the conviction that death is as natural as it is inevitable, and that no natural thing is to be dreaded either for ourselves or for others, then a shadow would be lifted from our lives.

But though you may concede the naturalness of death for the old, and even for those in middle life who are often wearier and more perplexed than the aged, in connection with the young, strong, and beloved it is unnatural, and no amount of reasoning can make it seem anything else. You may and do point out to yourself how much your child has undoubtedly been spared; still, deep in your heart lies the conviction that life is intrinsically desirable, and you cannot but grieve for what she has missed — not the great joys, either, but the little homely happinesses, such as the ride on the train that you had so long promised her ‘some day.’ But to thoughts like these there is no end. Unnatural as such a death may be, the stark fact of it must be woven into your daily life, and the less strange death is to you, the easier will be the weaving.

I am forced to admit, however, that under the conditions of modern life it is very difficult to become acquainted with death in the same manner and to the same degree as did our parents. In the present scheme of existence there is literally no room for the sick and the dead except in the places provided for them. Our acquaintance with the physiological aspect of death is for most of us bound to remain academic. But, after all, the physiological is of minor importance once we have determined the spiritual implications to our own satisfaction.

If the essential personality which we have cherished still maintains a conscious existence, and if at some future time we shall again encounter it, the importance of the physiological act wanes. Now there are many educated and intelligent people who have this assurance, or think they have, though their belief does not always survive the acid test. Rather more than half the letters I have received most positively assure me that the soul does survive. Unfortunately for me and for people like me, most of these believers pin their faith to the New Testament and are inclined to consider my inability to be satisfied with this testimony as willful rejection on my part, or else as due to ignorance of what it says. I am very well acquainted with the New Testament and am so far from willfully rejecting it that, though I do not at all care for Saint John’s vision of heaven, I should be very glad to accept its assurances. I freely acknowledge the supreme nobility of its ethical teaching, but its value to humanity is too often based on its legendary and unreliable proof of spiritual survival for me to find it of any great personal comfort.

VI

The real problem, however, is not whether the New Testament is historically accurate, but whether or not the entire universe is mechanistic or spiritual, fortuitous or planned, whether or not life is an accidental chemical combination or an important part of some transcendent design. That the truth about these questions bears no relation to the accuracy of the New Testament is a fact which is quite frequently overlooked. Because a great many of the Biblical statements have been disproved by science, doubters jump to the illogical conclusion that the theory of any spiritual basis for the universe has been disproved — which is absurd. The fact that Columbus was wrong in taking San Salvador for India did not prove India nonexistent. Of course we cannot hope to arrive at any absolute proof that there is a consciousness behind the universe, but if we can prove that the universe behaves as if it were the result of reason, rather than as if it were a purely coincidental combination of forces, we shall have laid the foundation for a reasonable hope that there is an underlying cosmic spirit.

If the universe is spiritual, then one would expect to run across some design, some glimpse of a gigantic pattern which, across the stars and down the ages, is gradually assuming who knows what strange and lovely shape. If, on the contrary, the universe is mechanistic, then one would expect to find it behaving in an unreasoning and purely arbitrary manner. I must admit that there are grounds for the latter belief as well as for the former.

The brutality and selfishness, not of savages, but of our own peoples, the most highly civilized of which there is any record, for years was to me completely irreconcilable with any idea of kindness behind the universe, or even of any reason. Now, however, I do not feel so sure about it. If there is no plan for the cosmos, why is the evolutionary trend always upward? If there is no kindness behind the universe, whence do we draw the idea that kindness is a virtue? Cruelty may still be rampant, but at least we recognize that it is an evil — even if we do not always agree upon what constitutes cruelty. Our consciousness of the difference between good and evil must, it seems to me, derive from a universal consciousness. I do honestly believe that if there were no reason or kindness in the universe there could be no such thing as good or bad. If there were no logic or virtue in the whole, how could there be logic and virtue in any of the parts?

I think it is fair to argue that our recognition of divine qualities implies a share in divine consciousness — that each separate individual is part of the divine consciousness. If this is true, then to a fragment of the cosmic soul fourscore years in the flesh will be as a watch that passes in the night.

But, even if the consciousness outlives the body, it does not necessarily follow that what survives retains the personality that made it individual and dear to those left behind. The old idea of death transforming a soul into an ‘angel’ seems to me to have its inception in the belief that any incarnated fragment of the cosmic soul lost, on death, the individuality developed through its incarnation. It has always seemed logical to me to assume — granted a divine consciousness behind the universe — that each portion of the cosmic soul has been split off to enable it to develop an individuality of its own. Instead of accepting the Christian theory of a brand-new soul in every body, it seems reasonable to suppose with Socrates that each baby brings with it into the world a soul which, like the body clothing it, has evolved through successive stages. The consciousness which was once a monocell’s dim perception of a difference between day and night perhaps goes through life after life until it may culminate in the personality of an Abraham Lincoln, a Socrates, or a Jesus of Nazareth. I like this theory because it does in some sort minimize nature’s vast wastefulness of life and renders cruelty unimportant except to the perpetrator. For if all life is on a spiral staircase, all subject to the same law, all going from worse to better or from better to worse according to the use made of opportunity, if from the simplest form of jellyfish to the most complex human being we are all passing from room to room of the cosmos, then what happens to any individual on any one step of the staircase, or in any one room, is of minor importance. If the universe had contained only pleasant experience, we should have remained jellyfish. Even the monocell’s first feeble effort was due to some vague discomfort.

Beyond all question, pain and sorrow are necessary to the development of the individual, and they cause despair only when we think of them as constituting all of life. If we can reasonably hope that our dead are only in the next room, then our greatest sorrow becomes transmuted into patience; perhaps into faith. It is hard to understand why the doors between the rooms should be so tightly closed that no sure word or sign can pass between, but perhaps if we were too sure of the next room we might lose interest in this one. It is undeniable that the races most firmly convinced of the immortal quality of the soul are among those who have done the least to improve the conditions of human existence.

VII

I have said that, as a theory, the foregoing appeals to me, but a theory, no matter how attractive, is not what one lives by, nor does it satisfy the heart crying for a certainty. Whether or not consciousness survives, death must be faced, not only the death of the old, — natural death, — but the death of the young — unnatural death. Just what is it that makes death dreaded? It is, I think, its strangeness and, even more perhaps, its loneliness. They who walked and talked with us, who shared the intimate detail of our lives, have now gone forth — to what? — alone. If we knew to what they went, or if we could company them even a little on that unknown way, we should be the happier. But are they so alone? Is there one single experience, one feeling or even one thought, which has not been shared by countless millions through innumerable ages?

Death is a stranger, but death is also the great commonplace. Wherever, as Socrates says, we find life, we find death; and wherever we find death, we find life. They are common to all, they are part of the same thing — perhaps the two sides of it; they are the warp and woof of the universe.

And in that reflection I find my comfort, the sure certainty which is not a theory demanding to be proved, but a fact on which I can rest. Just as you cannot conceive of life without death, so you cannot conceive of it without tragedy. Lacking tragedy, life would be neither beautiful nor terrible; it might be something better, but it would not be life as we know it. The death of the old is never tragedy; it is often beauty and kindliness. Of our lost babies, our little children, our young cut off at the flowering of their lives, of all the cherished and sheltered who have been thrust into the dark, as it seems, alone, we can know this: they are not alone; they, no matter whether or not any consciousness survives, are as much a part of the universe as are we ourselves.

Viewed against the background of eternity, our elaborate and impressive undertakings are less than children’s sand forts before an advancing tide. There is comfort in this recollection. Judged by the universal scale, the sound of John Robert playing ‘Redwing’ upon his mouth organ echoes as clearly among the stars as the crash of cannon along the Western Front. My baby’s four short years do not make her less significant than my father, who came to more than four score. They both lived and moved and had their being.

Dead, they are still part of the universe, even as I am part. Somewhere in the time stream they all exist: the unborn of future millenniums, the long-forgotten dead, and those whose loss is still an aching wound, who live in the hearts of the living as well as in the universe.

This sort of immortality is not so comforting as the conception of continuing individual consciousness, but it does away with the idea of utter destruction and definitely assures a certain continuance. If the person you have cherished lives somewhere in the universe, even though not at this particular place and time, it is not possible to think of her as dead. Since her thread in the pattern of the universe is therein woven to all eternity, we need not despair that it has separated from our individual strand. The quality of universal existence not even death can take away. If there is a surviving consciousness, so infinitely much the better— but, even if there is not, her thread is woven. And now she is safe. . . .