Death has been exceptionally visible this new year.
Death is nothing new. Death itself isn't a surprise, yet it interrupts life and what we're comfortable dreaming, wishing and knowing. When death takes stunning talent, like so many of those lately in the public eye, our comfort upends publicly, along with our dreams for the far reach of 80 with the best of them.
Death outpaces us uncomfortably sometimes. My young students love to dwell in the play of death, and it's hard to know what the depth of their interest is in this jarring reality. I'm attending as many funerals each year as weddings lately. Weddings don't take a lot of practice to manage one's emotions, but funerals, funerals pack so much remembering into one event that the circles of consciousness exhaust me for days. Nobody escapes death. Everyone can stand the practice of meeting it.
My 2016 started with a funeral, and a second one is ahead. My kids haven't had a lot of practice with human death, so even as their teenage selves expressed dismay at attending a family funeral I wondered how important it was to make them join. I think I was really responding to their fear and discomfort, which in turn made me respond to mine: what if we didn't get to practice death with people we didn't dearly love? How in the world would we manage when our truest loves demand departure?
Reading a picture book about the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. with my young students this week, I loved the story's easy assessment that he taught people how to solve problems and get along without hurting each other. What an easy sentiment for my students to understand. When I said that sounded like our school and asked the kids if they thought Martin Luther King would like our school, one immediately asked if he would visit. That's how I got to say he wasn't alive any more, long before we got to that chronology in the story. "He died? How did he die? Elvis died because he took too much medicine."
I had to explain he was shot, "Somebody shooted him to die? Why?"
Me: Sometimes people try to solve their problems by hurting each other. It's not the best way to solve problems.
It took us three days to corral the questions and energy to read this one book, but all three of those days we practiced death just a little bit. I'd like to think we are reaching toward 80 with a better comfort of how death ultimately becomes us.
