Quick note to readers: after a year and a half, I’m adding a contributing-subscription option to Leeway. I say “option” because I am not putting Leeway behind a paywall. All subscribers will continue to receive the semi-monthly installment and have full access to the archive. Substack does not offer a “donate” feature; for any of you who’d like to contribute something to this effort, you can subscribe monthly or yearly, and cancel that whenever you want.
I have also launched a Leeway Audio Essays Series of longer, more in-depth pieces on maritime technological history, as audio recordings. These are available to contributing subscribers; they require considerably more investment on my part to make. The first two episodes are already posted. The third should be ready by next Sunday, 14 January.
The Rolling Stones just released their first album of new material in eighteen years, and it’s strong; they can still show any rock band how it’s done. Drummer Charlie Watts played on two tracks before succumbing to cancer last year at 80, but both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have achieved that age this year with no signs of losing their powers. The “new” guitarist, Ronnie Wood, who joined the band in 1975, is only 76. Retired bassist Bill Wyman is still playing local gigs with his own band at 87. He too contributed to a track on Hackney Diamonds.
My Mom is also 87, but she is alive only thanks to multiple medications to control edema caused by congestive heart failure, and full-time supplemental oxygen. Thanks to those interventions, though, she can be out and about to a limited extent, and is still able to live mostly independently. For now.
While we certainly have seriously limited ability to control death, we have managed, as in so many other areas of our lives, to wrest a level of control over it that would have been inconceivable to any earlier people. As with our power to alter and re-alter the very climate of the planet, we now have the power to live longer lives and to postpone death by means of our technology. Like any fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, this power puts responsibilities and decisions into our hands that earlier peoples did not have, and thus it pressures for change in our culture.
It's always worth taking a young person through an old cemetery. It’s a silent testament to the almost-untrammeled power of death just over a century ago even in technologically-advanced countries like mine. Point out to them how many stones mark the graves of infants, toddlers, mothers and infants together who died in childbirth, the number of graves with the same death year, that of an epidemic of a disease no one gets now. Or, if they do get it, they get a course of antibiotics for it and walk away none the worse for wear. Point out how many people died in their thirties, forties, fifties, and how few lived into their eighties or beyond.
The prevalence of death throughout the lifespan meant that, for earlier people, death occupied a much different place in their cultures than it does in ours. With so little power over it, and with it so ever-present and close, it’s no wonder cultures comforted themselves with stories about the power of supernatural forces over death—about an afterlife, rebirth, resurrection, reuniting with lost loved ones after death. Those stories are, of course, still powerful in today’s cultures, if not as widely-accepted as they once were.
Few if any well-informed and thoughtful members of our society, though, would express the opinion that we have developed a healthy relationship with death. I would say that is because we really haven’t had time; as is so common, our technology has outpaced our culture, so there is a disconnect between the two that has resulted in a rather fraught relationship with mortality. We have used our technology spectacularly well to cheat death and prolong life. At the same time, though, we have over-used it. We have expected too much from it, as we are wont to do, and we have allowed it to enable an attitude toward death that could use improvement for the general well-being. In the process, we have spent staggering amounts of money.
The challenge for us is that, despite all we in the rich world can do to evade it in so many situations, and to reduce our risk of it, in so many ways—through the food supply we have, through our insulation from the extremes of weather and climate, as well as through our medical technology—we still must accept that death is an inevitable part of life. Life, like everything else in this universe, as far as we know, ends. When we deny that—whether consciously or not—we don’t do ourselves, or our society, any favors. And our ability to prolong life, and delay death, has its disadvantages; there is always a price for eating the fruit of that Tree. The thing in the prelapsarian Garden of Eden was that Adam and Eve had no decisions to make. They knew practically nothing; they needed to know practically nothing. They were, for all intents and purposes, children in paradise. We, though, have powers, and with those powers comes the necessity to know how to, and how not to, wield them.
Mick Jagger had a “heart procedure” a couple of years ago; he had to miss part of a tour, but they rescheduled it and he played all those dates. Keith Richards fell out of a coconut tree in the South Pacific and got a subdural hematoma for which he was airlifted to Australia for emergency brain surgery which saved his life. It is highly likely that if these things had happened even forty years ago, the Rolling Stones would now only exist through our speakers.
We can, however, and too often do, use our medical technology to prolong life to the point where a person’s being alive begins to call into question the meaning of the word “life” and suggests instead the word “existence;” because, as it turns out, we imbue the term “life” with a sense of worth, of quality, of a certain ability to exist in the world in a meaningful and rewarding way. It’s a classic Promethean dilemma; just because we can, does that mean we should? Past peoples did not have to wrestle with this dilemma. We do.
And we are. In recent months I have had to learn about Living Wills, Advance Directives, hospice, Death With Dignity, Health Care Power of Attorney. The law has taken big steps to grant people the right to retain control over their own end-of-life. At the same time, of course, the law must also bend over backwards to prevent murder; hence its squeamishness about “assisted suicide.” Our society is still working that out.
As we try to negotiate a new and healthier relationship with mortality, how can we learn from past peoples? This is a challenge for me; the traditional Christian culture of death in which I was raised is decidedly un-helpful. No past people knew what we know about reality—about how this universe works—although many of them understood, deeply, some of the most important aspects of the human condition—including those who wrote down the story of the first humans losing paradise after eating the Fruit. Perhaps what we are most likely to learn from them about death is the “naturalness” of it. They were well-acquainted with it. Many of them accepted it in a way that might serve us. Regardless of what their stories of an afterlife or an independent consciousness may have been, many of them practiced death rituals that suggest awareness of the connection between us as corporeal beings and the rest of matter and energy around us and in us.
We have already seen a large shift away from the practice of sealing up embalmed corpses in vaults to the tune of enough money to buy a new Jaguar. Cremation and the scattering of ashes in places of significance to the deceased or their survivors is common. As we become more conscious of the energy required for that process, and of the carbon emissions it produces, we are seeing more people turn to “natural burial”—the way the ancients did it, with a shroud or a simple pine box, with a full acceptance that the earth, and its creatures, would re-absorb the corpse into the very soil from which all terrestrial life springs.
High in the Himalayas, where the permafrost prevents burial, people hire an unclean outcast to cut up the corpse after the funeral and scatter the pieces for the vultures, which are already circling. This may be hard for those unfamiliar with the custom to stomach, but it recycles the corpse into other beings while preventing the possible spread of disease to other humans.
Perhaps, to the extent that older cultures, whether extinct or extant, can inform us as we pursue a new healthier relationship with death, it will be because they were, by necessity, more closely connected in general—both physically and psychologically—to the rest of the real world. To the processes that actually guide and govern life on this planet. We do not want to go back to how it was when those old cemeteries weren’t old. We rightly celebrate our technology of health and longevity. But we must learn how not to abuse it by over-using it. We need to re-learn how to accept death, as just as natural as birth.
My Mom knows she is dying. She accepts that. On her bad days, she wishes out loud that it would come sooner, but she knows—and we remind her often—that this is in her hands; she does not have to live longer than she wants to, and we have the care already in place to make her comfortable and cared for at the end. She isn’t ready for that, and when she is may well prove to be entirely up to her. Our challenge now, unlike what past peoples faced, is that, to an unprecedented extent, our deaths are in our own hands; they involve decisions that past peoples did not usually have to make. We have the technology they did not have—to prolong life. But we have to learn how and when to turn it off and surrender ourselves back to where we came from.