How to live with the idea of death
By Lethbridge Herald on May 31, 2025.
Tadashi (Tad) Mitsui
For the Herald
We will all die. I wonder how the garish narcissist of the South would cope with such idea as his own death.
Last two years at the church, I was a part of the discussion group about “death and dying.” We met once a month. From the outset, we agreed that fear of death was no longer a morbid subject to avoid.
We touched on the questions such as “how to die well,” body donation and parts thereof, Eternal Life, green burial, Medical Assistance in Dying, preparation for one’s own ending, how to plan one’s own funeral, death and humour, etc. Ideas for topics never ran out. After Easter, we decided it was a good time to take a break.
We know that life and death are a single integrated and inseparable process. Life starts its dying process when it begins. There is no life without death, neither is there death without life. It’s like two sides of a sheet of paper. There is no paper without the other side.
We had feared death so much that we tried hard to deny its inevitability because of pain, suffering, and violence that often came with death. We now know how to avoid those. The world is a better place for many of us. We now live in a relatively harmonious and peaceful world.
The dying process is more comfortable than it used to be. People live longer, too. For many of us fear of death is not a big issue. Some people, like my mother, live so long that their complaint is, “I’m tired; what’s the point?”
Advanced medical science is largely responsible for today’s favourable situation. For some, the process of dying is like falling asleep. So many of us are less afraid of death. Granted that separation from the loved ones breaks our heart. Otherwise, the dying process itself can be less serious grief.
Many traditional funeral hymns sound redundant. We hold “Celebration of Life” to bid farewell to the dearly departed in the company of friends with food and drink. Proviso is, however, there are still many people in the world who suffer painful death. We must continue to work to eliminate pain and suffering.
We no longer expect doctors to keep alive near-death persons to suffer incurable illness or unbearable pain merely to keep them alive. Medical Assistance in Dying is a legal procedure which many Canadians take advantage of. “Eternal Life” begins to sound like an oxymoron, “fake truth.” It’s an attempt to escape the fear of death.
We have to realize that there is no life without death. We have to get out of the futile attempt to separate the inseparable. So Apostle Paul replaced the meaning of resurrection from “Jesus died but came back to life” in the Gospel to “He returned in a spiritual (different kind of) body” in his Letter.
However, I do not believe that the physical elements that constitute a person disappears into nothingness. Einstein proposed with his famous equation that the matters continue to exist in different forms as particles, light, waves, energy, etc. The problem is our self-consciousness. My ego doesn’t allow “I” to vanish and turn into ashes to be a part of the atmosphere when my body is cremated.
Our self-consciousness demands us to stay as an independent entity in one piece. The offence against God in the Creation Story is about the emergence of our self consciousness.
Rebelling against God, we became conscious of our naked truth. We didn’t like what we saw, so we cover ourselves to hide our naked truth.
We want to live in a narcissistic delusion as an almighty immortal individual. We found we weren’t. We saw the truth and didn’t like it. The truth we saw of ourselves was not Michelangelo’s beautiful David. It was death. The ultimate curse of self-consciousness that we have to live with is the knowledge that we die. Awareness of such reality gave birth to self-loathing: the cold sweat of “Fear of Death.”
Without self- consciousness, we can happily exist forever in the vast universe in various forms as parts of other existence. The idea of Eternal Life must be rephrased if one wants to have “Eternity” to feel good about ourselves. We will have to re-discover the notion of corporate personality: “I” as tiny elements of various bodies in the vast universe. I am comfortable with that.
Robin Wall Kimmerer is mother, botanist, professor, celebrated one of the hundred most influential persons in the world by Time Magazine in 2025. She is an American Indigenous person. She is teaching us in her book, “Braiding Sweet Grass,” about the wisdom of Indigenous scientific knowledge and the teaching of plants. She advises us to listen to the plants to learn from their wisdom.
In Christian Church, however, such a notion was rejected as “Animism. Growing up in Japanese culture, I always had problems accepting such an anthropocentric obsession. I grew up in the culture to respect sacred animals, plants, trees, mountains, rivers and rocks. We believed that we are the children of the Great Sun Goddess Amaterasu, who brought all of us into the world and sustains us with energy and warmth.
We must learn from the wisdom of animals and plants to live together in harmony as the family of the universe. I believe in the eternity of existence. I am a part of the Corporate Person. I am happy with that thought.
20-19
Perfect, simply “perfect”.
I guess you will learn the truth when you leave your earthly body!
I have faced death several times without fear knowing that when this body no longer lives, my spirit will continue for eternity, in heaven with my Lord God Almighty! The one and true God!
God gives us all a choice how we will live out eternity! Heaven or Hell! He doesn’t force us to follow him!