I remember talking to my late friend, a woman who lived with multiple disabilities, about her experience being hospitalized most of 2024. She said something like, “[The medical team] kept bringing me back, but I’m less sure I want to stick around.” i told her that I understood that sentiment, because I do. In mental health treatment, I’ve been assessed for suicidality on a 0 to 5 scale. I made an attempt at the age of 12, finding myself miserable upon realizing it didn’t work. The only thing that kept me from future attempts was a lack of tools. I was in pain. I didn’t have a way for someone to kill me, so I wished to do it myself. I wanted to belong to something so badly that I thought only death could envelop me.
In the current state of the world, there are innumerable climate change refugees alongside political refugees, both groups created by corporate greed and neo-colonialism. With a nearly global choice to ignore covid, people die “mysteriously” when they’ve likely suffered irreparable damage to their bodies after one or more infections. Every day, more people in Sudan, Congo, Palestine, and so many other places suffer through genocide if they are “lucky;” the others perish after going through hell. When one of us in the global north suffers, it’s very easy to assume that some stranger on the other side of the planet “has it worse,” as if our neighbors don’t endure the unthinkable in front of our faces. The thing is, that kind of comparison doesn’t alleviate my or anyone else’s misery. In my opinion, it minimizes those experiences and does not actually address the pain people have. Of course, we may envy someone else’s hard times. How often do you hear or read, “I’d kill to have those kinds of problems?” It isn’t an affirmation of anything we go through. It is, instead, a stifling of very real and valid feelings.
People experience a range of emotions, including deep pain. I don’t think anyone wants to feel pain all the time, every day, for the rest of their life. In the US, we are socialized to see death as a punishment for being insubordinate or otherwise “bad,” especially when someone has done harm to others. There’s also the myth that death is an equalizer. We don’t live the same, so death can’t equalize anything. George Floyd’s murder isn’t the murder of Laci Peterson and her yet unborn child. The death of Rosa Parks will not ever be regarded the same way as the death of Julian Bond, and so on. Because we do not live the same lives, even as members of the same social in-group, no death is the same. I do not magically stop embodying my identities when I die — these identities and their social positions are context for how I live and how I die. Antiblackness requires that I die every time I fall outside the parameters of palatable Blackness; ableism creates a world where I have to prove my suffering just to get a little help. That doesn’t go away when my last breath passes through me.
It’s an embarrassment that people are so often discouraged from talking or thinking about dying. So many folks are uncomfortable because they fear what happens when they die. Not specifically from a religious perspective, though Puritan theology is the basis of most US cultural attitudes. Romans 6:23 fuels attitudes about everything, to such an extent that the common view of abuse victims always asks what they did to be harmed. The wages of your sin, as a person who’s been harmed, is social or other death. That shows up and feeds abuse ecosystems, which thrive on the same silence that drives people like me to fear discussion of death. There are all manner of guides to teach parents and other adults how to talk with kids about death and loss. I sincerely think those guides are more for the adults. Not because they don’t need a framework, but because they are likely responding to death the same way their child selves did. That, in my opinion, comes from the silioing of death. Death happens all day every day: animals, humans, stars, plants, physical spaces … everything dies. Nothing humans build is permanent, as we are not permanent beings. Our ideas and views, if we’re paying attention to life, aren’t permanent at all. Aging and living give us information that can change us in subtle and overt ways. The ultimate life change, to me, is death. It should be honored and respected.
Truly, if we respect death, we need to respect people who ponder it.. It’s essential to the wholeness of human experience.