A Tale of Two Deaths
What Two Recent Very Public Deaths Can Teach Us about Life
Religion begins with the perception that something is wrong.
Karen Armstrong, The History of God
Some of us may feel like Rip Van Winkle waking up from the recent concentrated media attention on two back-to-back exceptionally public deaths. We have been picking through Death's bones so assiduously - we may have to be reminded that we have, after all, lives to live.
Theresa Schindler-Schiavo died - if we can call it that - in Florida on March 31. About 48 hours later, Karol Wojtyla died in Rome. Both were Catholic and received their Church's Last Rites on their deathbeds. Both required feeding-tubes during their much scrutinized final hours. Both commanded a public focus so absorbing that all other "news" of the world seemed to stop until their separate stories played out.
But the comparison between the deaths of Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul II ends there. The differences in the circumstances of their passing are vast - and in those dissimilarities lie some lessons for us.
John Paul II left the planet peacefully and resigned, surrounded by treasured friends. Weighted down with age and infirmity, which he chose heroically to show to the world during his decline, John Paul met death, without regret, according to reports, and with the anticipation of returning to his divine Source. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands below his window - and millions around the world - sent up prayers of thanksgiving for his long and honorable service to humankind.
Terri Schiavo left the planet from a pit of rancor. Her husband, Michael, and everyone on his side, were in bitter conflict with her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler and everyone on their side, over the issue of whether her body should be allowed to die - her actual death, according to most medical experts, had taken place fifteen years and thirty court cases earlier. The drama was, among other things, a remarkable display of American materialism applied to the world of the spirit.
What lifted Schiavo's deathwatch from a merely pathetic to a morbid media extravaganza was the sudden introduction near the end of fundamentalist religious believers and their allies. They flocked to the deathbed inside and the microphones outside the hospice where Schiavo's body lingered in biological limbo and turned the event into a cause for their agenda of installing a theocracy atop the nation's fragile democracy.
There they were, the Father O'Donnells, the Father Pavones, and dozens of their Evangelical brothers, using the words "murder" and "euthanasia," fury in their eyes and the hopes of book contracts in their hearts. Literalist Born-Agains had found their perfect collaborators in literalist Catholics. Both had one axe to grind: make America a mighty Christian fortress supported by their peculiarly antiquated concepts of death - and life.
The great irony in the Schiavo melodrama was that the secular humanist husband wanted to release his wife's body from the prison of medical machines to allow her to return to her Maker. The fundamentalist religious swarm wanted her to remain in this vale of tears - and did everything in their power to prevent her from going to heaven, which, in their religions' view, is the point and purpose of our earthly sojourn in the first place. He was willing to let her go; they refused to let her go. If the preachers and their attendants had their way, Terri Schiavo's body would lay there until the machines gave out or the Rapture dawned - whatever came first.
Religion owns death. Eschatology is the branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world and of humankind - and the final events in our individual lives. For eons, religion has told us nearly everything we know about death, including what happens to us after death. An eschatological article of faith, at least for Christians and Muslims- who comprise 53% of the world's six billion souls - is that when death comes, our bodies return to the earth, but our souls, the immortal part of us, go to heaven, assuming we have been virtuous, or hell if we have not.
Religion also owns birth. What we know about the actual theory of when life commences, aside from the biological evidence, has come down to us down through the ages from theologians. In the first few centuries A.D., the heyday of Christian theology, the moment of the soul's entry upon the planet in the vehicle of the body was hotly debated - inconclusively. Religious thinkers, taking their cues mostly from Aristotle, placed the first appearance of the individual soul anywhere from before conception to after birth. In other words, when a person came upon the scene spiritually was anybody's guess.
Likewise when the person left. Without the advantages (and obvious drawbacks) of modern medical technology, theologians' concepts about when death occurs ranged all over the place: the cessation of heart activity, brain activity, respiratory activity, the onset of rigor mortis, and so on. In the case of an apparently dead Pope, a Cardinal strikes his head with a ceremonial silver hammer. Maybe that should have been tried at the Florida hospice, as well. The argument over time-of-death, alas, is still going on.
The way of religion is faith without questioning; the way of science is inquiry and observation. For thousands of years, priests have been the guardians of life's sunrise and sunset. Now that religion everywhere senses itself embattled, besieged by a fast-paced modernism, it is more unlikely than ever that it would hand over the keys of life's front and back door to science and secular philosophy.
But until we are able to get beyond the dead-end of blind faith and allow science to explore these hitherto hidden milestones of our human existence, we are likely to continue to debate the questions endlessly and fruitlessly, with increasing disregard for the quality of life itself.
When Pope John Paul II finally expired, and therefore one assumes, died, a Rome newspaper's entire front page, in Italian, was simply, "Be not afraid!" They were the Pope's own words, in his first homily after his elevation on October 22, 1978. Upon his departure, his grand rallying call may be the best counsel to the faith on behalf of which he labored so many years, and all other faiths - to allow the mind to explore, investigate, and scrutinize freely and fearlessly outside the judgments of theology.
Perhaps these two deaths may help us begin to uncover the truths still veiled around the two sacred parentheses in eternity that comprise our human journey.
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