Dealing with Death in the Age of the Pandemic
Between the recent deaths of my sister Pat at age ninety-five and of my best friend Bill, four days short of his ninety-third birthday, I attended a Zoom seminar on the psychology of aging and death. Perhaps contrary to what the poet Dylan Thomas wrote in his “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” during the pandemic, death will indeed have dominion, dominating our lives and psyche, with likely lifelong ramifications. I recall my mother late in her life talking guardedly about the 1918 Pandemic that she lived through, at the end of World War I. “It was as if the war had never stopped,” she said. And World War II would follow all too soon. I tell her story in my upcoming novel, “When War Becomes Us,” due out in 2021.
There were about seventy people at the Zoom seminar on aging and many shared stories about the death of loved ones. Though these revelations were not the main objective of the course, they added humanity, caring and a deep sense of loss. I thought that the stories were almost religious and redemptive in tone and effect. This sharing was a gift and a blessing to me in light of my recent losses. I realized prayer comes in many forms. I did not expect to find this kind of deliverance on Zoom.
The class was comprised of about seventy people including a sprinkling of psychologists among the crowd. Accordingly, the discussion was grounded from the very beginning. The Jungian instructor was emphatic from the onset of the class that with aging comes losses and opportunities. Perhaps we will learn to relinquish our burdens and shadow elements. The instructor mentioned the Egyptian goddess Maat, representing order and balance. The scales she carries shows the soul in perfect balance with a feather representing the unburdened soul, a perfect state that is ready for admittance into heaven.
Of course, this example is nicely wrapped in mythology and perhaps is missing the nagging sting of modernity, of knowing, and perhaps consciousness. Dylan Thomas was long my favorite poet, probably in part because his language seemed to get out in front of experience in such lovely ways and he remained defiant until his early end. In the poem mentioned earlier Thomas wrote: “Though lovers be lost love shall not.” This “Dominion” poem reads like a thumping psalm or a prayer, reminding us that even when the world goes mad, we can be sane. Thomas sounds godlike in his poetic benediction. However, he does explore, in his muscular poetic way, the human shadow that won’t trump the collective will and goodness of human kind. Still, he was only thirty-nine when he died. The poet is nibbling at psychology.
Embracing the shadow is a key part of aging and preparing for death. This might mean an acceptance of what is, a recognition of what is unknowable, and an attendant humility. The instructor suggested creativity is a great help against what might otherwise be a destructive aging process. She cited T.S. Eliot’s words from the “Wasteland”: “These fragments I have shored against my ruin.” His words, his poetry will outlive his death. Perhaps that’s what Dylan Thomas had in mind. Creativity allows us to move into a problem and deal with it. As one class attendee said: “Creativity changed my life.”
The instructor has long taught courses in literature (novels) and psychology and had many great examples at her fingertips. She mentioned Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” in which the protagonist, in a “dark hole” before his death, has visions of his childhood and is gradually able to remove the masks he had hidden behind as an adult. In a vision he imagines a light entering his dark hole. He can now acknowledge his approaching death.
Jung addresses this theme in his “The Child Archetype” (Collected Works, Vol. 9) in which he discusses the need to link up and reconnect with the past. The reconnection is in the descent. At such times it is not unusual that one might have dreams of childhood which Jung considered an important part of the journey. And children also pave the way to the future, providing what might be a mediation of opposites, between life and death. “What shall I tell my children” is a question that is a central part of this mediation. In this spirit the instructor provided art by the poet William Blake. His “Death’s Door” showed an old man entering the tomb and a young man sitting on top of the structure, as if he is greeting the world. The movement of the art seems slow and archetypal, even inevitable.
Our goal is to move graciously toward death but, quite naturally, we are held back by fear or a kind of nostalgia that over-romanticizes the past. Our meaning is found in a good life and a good death. Our allegiance is to soul or psyche, though not in the strict religious sense. What happens after death is beyond our rational understanding, but the notion that our inner life is eternal is widespread. As the instructor noted, all we can ask is to “demand” that we be the author of our own stories. Toward the end of the session, the Zoom space seemed alive with tales of participants telling their stories, whether in fiction, diaries, poetry, sand play, song, body work, dance, painting and the like. I sensed that many people present were well into the task. That in itself seemed redemptive.
The session concluded with the instructor talking about a 2004 film that captured the love affair of a young couple, perhaps sixty years after the fact, through the eyes of an elderly man telling a story in a nursing home. It was about the love affair of a couple, Allie and Noah, and when they were older. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s and dying. Noah would read every night the story that he had written about their love affair. He would ask Allie if she remembered. Sometimes she did, perhaps for five minutes.
In the film, the story seemed to live forever.
