Facing Death

A Reflection

In the last couple of days, we’ve been bombarded with images and stories of the most defiant and courageous acts in recent memory, all done with a captive national audience watching. We all saw the former president do his best impersonation of Teddy Roosevelt, shaking his fist in the air to tell the world he was okay, and would fight to the end. We learned, off the main frame, the tragic story as another hero threw his family to the ground and used himself as a human shield, getting killed by the gunman’s stray bullet.

There has been plenty of discourse about how this will shape politics in the future, the optics of the event in the scale of world history, and the stunning contrast in how the two sides of America saw the incident. more usefully, it also opened up a retrospective on what it means to live as a man in the modern age.

Every red-blooded man has imagined himself in some action-packed scenario, imaging the most elaborate fight scene where he would prove himself against impossible odds. Every boy growing up imagines himself performing and act of heroism, and a good many hours are spent in pretend play choreographing the exact scenario. His reading is inundated with heroic adventures of boys growing to be men along the rites of passage necessary to make them feel worthy to their peers. It also, tragically, means many adult males never get to feel what it feels to be a man, falling back to old nostalgia of what might have been.

In my life, I thankfully have witnessed many men close to me who not only taught me how to live a good life, but also how to die well. I have never been in the presence of a man whose actions were world-changing, but lived their life in a way that left out any room for true regret, and showed through their suffering what it means to be a man.

Dying as a Husband

My grandfather never had any breaks in life. His father died soon after he was born, and his mother died when he was four, found dead with her face in a feeding trough. Being the youngest in a family of six, the eldest sister took over the family. He had a simple rural life until he turned 18, where he celebrated his birthday by enlisting in WWII. He spent time of his tour in occupied Italy for the military police, sending most of his earnings back to his family until a car ran him off the road when he was on a motorcycle and was transported home with a head injury. During his time at rehab, he would find convoluted ways to sneak out at night to spend time with my grandmother.

They got married, he took a job at an auto manufacturing plant, the speech issues caused by the accident stymying his dreams of becoming a lawyer. Talking to my mother, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone as loving and devoted to my grandmother as my grandpa. We’re not talking about the modern limp-wristed weakness of modern married men, but a man who was always in charge, and took his post over his family with deadly seriousness. Through all this, he had a cheerful demeanor that would be laced with moments of dark humor (when my grandma’s dad died soon after they married, he joked that he couldn’t handle his daughter getting married to him).

He was an avid woodworker, and my favorite story is how he cut a replica of my grandma with a broom in her hand that could be put in a stance like she was sweeping, or like she was about to take a swipe at you. Whenever she was in a bad mood, he would grin and she would yell “DON’T YOU DARE MOVE THAT BROOM”, which he would laugh, do it anyways, and retreat to his shop.

As they got on in years, my grandmother’s mental state deteriorated, something that grandpa largely hid from the family until it became too obvious to ignore. He protected her, afraid she would taken to a nursing unit. Unfortunately for my grandpa, he started to get mini-strokes, leading to issue with balance that ended up with his collapse and an extended visit to rehab. As much as he wanted to take care of her, he was in too bad of shape to do so, and several doctors commented they don’t understand how the guy wasn’t dead.

She ended up having to be sent to a memory unit, the family’s efforts to keep her home stymied by her rapid deterioration. It was next door to the rehab center in the hopes grandpa would be able to join her and be together for their final months. It wasn’t to be, and she passed away. When the family told him, after the pain subsided, he made his peace. The last day he was conscious, he talked about talking to his wife and deceased brother. Later, the nurse found him on the ground that night after he attempted to get on his knees to pray, just like he always did. She put him back in bed and he never woke up, dying died less than two weeks after his wife passed. My uncle, sharing grandpa’s dark humor, said “I just had two grievance leaves for parents back-to-back, I think they might be suspicious.”

Dying as a Priest

In my youth, we had a string of bad priests in my hometown parish. One was a chain smoker, to the extent no mass would be longer than 45 minutes so he could rush out for a fix. His successor was worse, and spent his sermons tut-tutting our rural community for being backwards bigots, telling us hunting is evil, we should accept gays, and refused to do Memorial Day services because he thought they glorified war.

After that priest was more or less run out of town, the Diocese got the message and sent a priest who was a local rural-ite from the area. He did his job, and there was nothing remarkable about him in the beginning, though that was a blessing after the previous pastors we had. After a few years, he learned he had a particularly nasty disease that attacked one’s skin, slowly but surely deteriorating it until it had the texture of tissue paper. The usually spry old man walked slower and in great pain, and his sermons got shorter as the torment of his condition accelerated.

Through it all, he had stubbornness that made him refuse to vacate his position. He still presided over Mass every Sunday and did his duties, even as the sickle of death approached nearer. Finally, he received terrible tears that required hospitalization, and he stood face-to-face with death.

I’ll always remember in his funeral how our Bishop recalled his suffering in the hospital, how his skin was tearing up everywhere leading to horrible bleeding as the poor pastor tried to give him consolation. He recalled the simple priest had no self-pity, and never complained about the pain. He just insisted the Bishop pray with him for hours as he prepared for eternity.

He passed away, and the entire town attended his funeral, understanding underneath the veneer of a simple priest there was a great saint.

Dying as a Soldier (denied)

I never knew anyone personally who died in war, thank God, but I know plenty of people where war nearly killed them in other ways.

One of my colleagues was a medic in Iraq, and got caught in a firefight with some soldiers. He watched as his companion right next to him got shot in the throat and die before he could do anything.

Another was a full post-9/11 patriot, who went as far as to drape himself in American flags for pro-intervention rallies and would shout obscenities at protestors in military recruitment centers. He was deployed and he came back…. very subdued. He went from staunch jingoist to hard-core libertarian, his political ideology transforming from his rough experience.

One of my relatives followed a similar path, only he wanted to be a soldier practically since he was born. An eccentric guy and an adrenaline junkie, he happily enlisted and was deployed to Iraq. He came back as demoralized as a person can be, staring off into space in disappointment at the entire fiasco and talking about it in long, meandering tales that were as pointless as his service. He later tried to join the Army Rangers, but a chronic injury forced him to drop out.

I’ve talked to vets of WWII as well as Vietnam, and even those who thought the war they fought wasn’t completely justified and thought the upper brass was incompetent, they still felt that they fought for something real. They understood they served their country, their people, regardless of the foibles of leadership or the arena of their battle.

These veterans of the War On Terror got nothing of that. They got the trauma that war always entails, the friends lost, the hardship endured, the opportunities lost, but none of the pride of serving. All of them felt they were used, chewed up and spit out by a bureaucracy that wasn’t just indifferent, but actually despised their service. They were meat puppets to be transferred around at will based on a set of priorities that did nothing tangibly good for their people, or even their country, but solely a bureaucrat’s spreadsheet.

They won’t be able to look forward to old war stories to tell to their grandkids in their old age to help numb the pain of those days, and will have no good memories of enduring unbelievable hardship for a higher cause. Every one of them thought their service was for nothing. They were good men who will always have a hole in their heart that can’t be filled. Good soldiers, yes, but they will never feel like good soldiers.

Memento Mori

Every major religious tradition has strong reminders of one’s inevitable death at the forefront, and every tradition understands that facing death swell involve living with one’s ultimate demise always in view. There is no board meeting that can give you action items to complete to be ready, no nebulous online guru you have a para-social relationship online that can tell you. Such aspirational are always those closest to you you have a deep, one-on-one connection to, heroic historical figures, the actions of those with deep resonance in broader culture that consistently perform heroically in the current day, and the examples found in one’s faith.

As much as the impulse for goodness whatever one’s lot in life is disparaged, mocked, and degraded in favor of base desires, the core reality of what it means to lives still matters. As much as current culture tries to eliminate the sting of death with a “Celebration of Life” as opposed to a proper funeral, ruthless Nature still reigns supreme in this world, and we would be served well to focus our eyes on the Master of the world to come.