The Sequence of Death

On reaching 76 years old last Friday, the topic over dinner turned to Death, as it does…..! The older a person gets the more aware of their imminent demise they become. To be fair, the topic hit me in menopause, as it seems to with lots of women I have found. It was not the first time I had danced with Death, but the first time I was consciously aware of it. Anyway, menopause. It’s a strange experience living through a time when your ability to create life is leaving you. It doesn’t matter whether you have been a mother or not, there is a change inside that cannot be denied, although few perhaps name it.

Along with that understanding, and part of its rite of passage, is the fact that our bodies completely change. Our shape and size usually morphs into something less attractive (in our cultural understanding of what makes us so in the first place). We can get headaches, hot flushes, aches, and pains. We stiffen up, dry up, and stop shutting up. This bit is really interesting because encouraged as we have all been throughout our lives as women, to be ‘nice,’ we are now riddled with what I came to call ‘Menopausal Rage’. The catch cry of that period is “get the hell out of my way”.

No matter how we experience it, deep down inside we know we are no longer young things. Some try their hardest to stay that way. Others give up. But seeing it as a rite of passage, and being me, I decided to ‘come out’ as a Crone. It wasn’t easy as my size 8 body swelled through the sizes, eventually reaching size 14 from that small size.It was a shock to my system, let alone my wardrobe. Gone were the tight jeans and leather pants, tucked in neatly as I preferred. In came the flowing shirts and stretchy pants.  Alongside that, I found myself grieving for the upcoming leave taking of this world that felt close by at that stage. I mourned the fact that I would no longer be able to see the trees, feel the breeze, experience the other beings that walked alongside me in this wonderful world.

But I didn’t die then. That was 30 years ago in fact. But my relationship with loss, wearing the mask of Death, has never left me. I faced the fear of it, bargained, and wheedled, eventually coming to terms with the fact that it was definitely inevitable. I have in fact been dancing with Death my entire life. The first attempt was not coming out into this world at all. It took them 32 hours and a pair of forceps to get me to leave, and I wasn’t gracious about it. I refused my mothers milk from the get-go, and not saying it was a choice, I couldn’t breathe, eat, or shit.

My first formal NDE (Near Death Experience) was at the age of 8, where I started down ‘that’ tunnel, only to finally decide I didn’t want to go after all. I dog-paddled back to consciousness, to be scooped up and stuck in an oxygen tent by a gorgeous West African male nurse. I still have his autograph in the little book I had that was the rage then, with the picture of me as a Teddy Bear sitting up in the tent.

But recent years, I have realised how important Death is. Everything on this Planet, and indeed in this reality, has a beginning and an end. There are lots of mini-deaths throughout Life. It’s just another name for endings, brought about by the existence of linier time. The end of childhood. The end of relationships, careers, pets. It’s a series of beginnings, middles, and endings. Life in matter requires us to be born, live in it for a while, and then exit to make way for the more that are being born and created. The principle of decay ensures that we don’t all clog up the system but have adequate time to explore what we want to explore in the Time/Space environment before leaving. But what is it that ends? Well, it’s the physical construction that we took on at conception. The energy of who we are is continually repurposed to allow for maximum experiences in matter.  So, the energy that is currently being Jay Ray, will soon return to the energy pool to become something else.

The first time I encountered this concept was in Phillip Pulman’s book The Golden Compass. Towards the end of the journey that the book was, the lead character, Lyra, set all the souls free from heaven, and they all joyfully dispersed into slivers of light and disappeared into everything else. With tears in my eyes, I realised that he had just documented the version of Death that felt right for me. Recycle, reuse, repurpose.

How did we become so fearful of this beautiful ending? What caused us to attempt denial that it was necessary? My new book The Infinite Compass comes up with quite a deep look at the whole phenomena as we attempted to do one better than Nature, getting ourselves into the pickle we are in. But we build whole industries based on fighting the inevitability of Death, not just cryonics. Stephen Jenkinson asks the question why are we so scared, to the point of phobia, of Death? Other animals don’t seem to be. This is where we started our conversation at dinner on Friday. What is it that scared us? I have a suspicion it was the invention of ownership, covered at length in my book. When we shared everything, we had a greater understanding of the three R’s listed above. But what even caused us to try and accumulate ‘stuff’ that we couldn’t take with us leading to all this madness?

Maybe it was awakening to the understanding that we couldn’t last forever. We realised it but were not emotionally mature enough to come to terms with it, until we had lived a lot longer as a species. It seems we are not there yet. Nevertheless, Death comes when its time to come, not a minute later. Well, that’s alright. But I still keep having chats with it, to see what I can negotiate for an easier passing. No doubt my death, like my life, will be just exactly what it needs to be..for the greater good of all.