Practicing Dying for the Final Showdown

Sitting beside his bedside in his hospital allocated room, I watched my dad present a fearless exterior and an almost nonchalant disposition to his medical predicament. Of course, I had no way of knowing if it was only a show or if he truly felt the calm boldly written all over his face. He had just recently been diagnosed with a liver disease which thankfully was treatable but had a significant amount of risks to accompany it. Friends and family came in and out to visit with him and encourage him the best they could.

As I watched and listened to their conversations, all I could think of was how strong my dad looked even in the face of possible death. My thoughts were further confirmed when a lady who had come in to visit got overwhelmed by emotions and broke into tears. In a strange turn of events where the patient in need of comforting becomes the comforter, my dad kept consoling and asking her not to cry. After which he began to sing in a soft soothing voice, “tun da uban mu na sama, bana jin tsoro. Tunda uban mu na sama bana jin tsoron komai”, a Hausa song which loosely translates to, “since our father (God) is in heaven, I am not scared of anything”.

It’s been three years now since he passed on and I often find myself revisiting those last moments that led up to his death. I was left with so many questions. Why did my dad seem so at peace in the face of death? Why has his death made me less afraid of dying? Why does death scare us so much?

There is a popular saying that goes, “everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die”. In spite of our ideological, religious differences and scientific beliefs, there appears to be a general consensus that suggests a destination after the event of death. We call this the afterlife. Many stories and alleged personal visitations to the afterlife have turned up in books and movies as well. These stories which are as old as time, have served to paint a mental picture of what Heaven or Hell might look like. For better or worse, those mental pictures have given hope and a sense of purpose to millions worldwide, not to mention inspired morality in the anticipation of what is to come after we are no more.

Unfortunately, nobody has quite been successful in painting such a picture about the journey itself; death. Through science and shared or personal experience from losing a loved one, we know that the body loses all consciousness and functions after being pronounced dead. All we know, is that a loved one closes his eyes on this side and never wakes up again. We also know what it means to be alive: to enjoy the pleasures of life, to suffer pain when it deals us a bad hand, to enjoy relationships with others, gain the trust and affection of our favorite pets and everything else that ascertains our existence and acknowledges our contributions to the world. Sadly, the only knowledge that has eluded the human mind to this point, is what happens when we are no longer conscious. The question of what happens when life is sapped from our bodies and we are oblivious to all that goes on above and around us. That question in my opinion, is what makes the idea of dying so scary.

I believe that the most dangerous enemy to have is one you neither know nor can see coming. In every aspect of our lives, trepidation and fear are only experienced where there is an unknown. Were death not so shrouded in mystery and completely elusive to the human mind’s understanding despite thousands of years of progressive civilization, perhaps it wouldn’t be so scary. It is no wonder that people who aren’t scared of death are believed to have unlocked some kind of god mode to damn all consequences and single-mindedly pursue everything they desire.

Interestingly, when we admit to being scared of death precisely because we do not know what happens next, then as a matter of fact we conversely admit to being scared of the unknown — unfamiliar grounds, fields where we have no experience, risks where all the variables stacked against us are alien to us. If the fear of death can be narrowed down to the fear of the unknown, it is safe to say from the moment we draw our first breath as babies, to when we draw our last, no matter when that is, we would have successfully died hundreds of times.

Thankfully, these deaths are usually less ceremonial. Most often they pass without any acknowledgement even by those who live out the experience. It happens when a child is resuming at a new school for the very first day. The thoughts of how other kids at school would treat him, if he would fit in and how different things would be are all little deaths. How about an entrepreneur seeking to start a business venture in an unstructured, new market with scarce resources at his disposal to make it a success? Or a family moving to a new neighborhood thousands of miles away, into new jobs? Death is all around us. We live through it every day and don’t even realize it.

I have come to the conclusion that without death — be it the loss of consciousness and complete body function or, facing uncertainty and lots of unknowns — we wouldn’t truly appreciate life. Some would argue that facing the unknown is what makes life worthwhile. I am inclined to agree. For the alternative is to live without the excitement of finding out, knowing for one’s self, or worse to live a lifetime void of any mysteries to unravel.

Death is a word too many times spoken of only under hushed tones. Defined to be an end. It is synonymous with tears, a generous helping of heartache and misery. But it really doesn’t have to be that way! We are capable of finding courage to face mortal death through all the victories and lessons learnt from the many deaths we continue to live through each day. And if one is open to the challenge, then “the undiscovered country”, the afterlife is yet another puzzle to piece together.

In the three years since my father’s death, I have gone through all the stages of grief. More importantly, I have tried to understand the concept of death for myself. I cannot claim to have it all figured out but, I am certain that I fear death even less now not just because my dad who experienced life before me, has also now gone before me into the great unknown, but because I realize I have died several times over each time I was confronted with new risks or challenges I was terrified of. In addition to my faith which tells me what happens in the afterlife, I am convinced that in the final moments of my dad’s life, the calm he so gracefully exuded was an exhibit of the courage he felt to face whatever was at the other side of the door he was about passing through. I have learnt from his transition that death and life are not mutually exclusive after all. As it is part of life to face many unknowns with an opportunity to learn from them all, so also it is with death. “The dead tell no tales” is only true if death is truly the end. Is it?