The Pope's last lesson in the art of dying well
(Filed: 02/04/2005)
It is said by some people, who have been declared dead after their hearts had momentarily stopped beating, that the experience can be pleasant, as you apparently drift upwards in a dreamlike trance, staring down joyfully at your soulless corpse.
Indeed, Keith Lake, who was interviewed in this paper earlier in the week about his near-death experience in the Maldives during the tsunami, said: "The only thought I had was that [death] wouldn't be that bad. I was totally relaxed, and, strangely, it was almost a good feeling."
But these are people who have sudden deaths, or near-deaths. They are the exception to the rule of modern death, which, for most of us, will tend more to the long, drawn-out agony of Pope John Paul II than the mercifully sudden death of the heart attack on the tennis court or the sideswipe of a 50ft wave.
In these days where medical science has become expert at keeping the body alive for many years, even as the body's various functions shut down, the drawn-out fates of the Pope, Ronald Reagan, Iris Murdoch and, presumably, Prince Rainier are the sad norm.
It sounds competitive to suggest that somebody has had a good death. In the same way that no one says, "He had a bad war", talking of a bad death sounds like the height of bad form.
That said, the Pope has prepared himself for a good death even if, at the time of writing, he is still alive. In the Christian faith, death is seen as the door from one life to another. The Pope has spent a lifetime preparing for the passage through that door to the afterlife; to put it crassly, if he's not going to Heaven, who is?
But he has also faced his actual dying moments - his exit, to continue the door analogy - in the best possible manner.
By refusing to go to hospital to die, he has chosen not to fend off death. But, while staying in the Vatican, he has also stayed in the public eye as long as he was physically able, not squirrelling himself away in his private apartments to cover up the speechlessness and paroxysms of a dying man. Instead, this most histrionic - in the best sense of the word - of popes has used the most powerful imagery - that of a dying man - to bear witness to the life and death of Christ.
In advertising his approaching death so nobly, the Pope is bucking the modern way of dying. As death has been transported from a family affair in hearth and home to a hidden thing in curtained-off cubicles in hospitals, it has become the word that dare not speak its name. In Vatican bulletins yesterday, even many priests, who have more experience of death than most, talked only of the Pope clinging to life, of his lucidity and consciousness, and refused to use the dreaded "D" word.
If death is not quite, as Hamlet put it, a consummation devoutly to be wished, it is one of the pre-eminent facts, if not the pre-eminent fact, of life, by which almost everything else is measured. As Craig Brown once wrote in these pages, how terrible it would be to live for ever: why would you bother getting up in the morning, let alone set about splitting the atom or writing a bestseller, if you knew you could get down to that sort of thing properly in another million or so years?
To face death head on, in all its agonies, is to remove the embarrassment and confusion that comes with euphemisms, with anodyne, bloodless talk of "passing on" and "drawing to a close". The Pope has taught us all how to die.