Integrating Death

Whenever I think about death, or serious illness, or being disabled, or some other tragedy striking me or someone I love, I feel a lot of distress.  Most people would feel distress from these topics, I suppose.  Yet it struck me today how odd this is.

We know from a fairly young age that any of these things, and many other tragedies, are possible, and do actually happen, and while the depth is often not driven home until we personally experience it, still there is a reaction that I would consider normal - fear, perhaps, or even anger.

What I discovered in myself, however, was a feeling of shock, as if I really had never believed these things would happen.  If I hear of someone who had just gotten the news that they had terminal cancer, it would not merely be sad to me, or stimulate fear - each time it would be like a nasty reality that had rudely invaded whatever set of beliefs I had been carrying.

I am realizing that within my mind, I am busily constructing a story about life and the universe that does not include many of the facts of life - I am constructing a fantasy of how life is, despite my solid knowledge of pieces I now realize I am leaving out.  I am systematically ignoring certain facts of life in building my story, so that I am continually shocked when one of these nasty facts hit me in the face.

The oddness of this is that, one would think that we as natural creatures, existing as the current end product of a long line of natural processes, with our intelligence and understanding, would have long ago integrated the basic facts of life into our story; that just as a dog or a bird knows instinctively how to live his life, and how to respond to normal occurrences of life, that we, too, knowing these facts, would have come up with a world view that had so incorporated them that they seem normal, natural parts of life, even if they are not desirable.  It seems that healthy creatures who have lived in an environment where death and pain have existed for millions of years, would have somehow learned to integrate those facts into how they live life, and would expect these things to happen.  A tragedy would happen, and while we might be sad, we would not be surprised or shocked, or have our world view shaken in any way, or lose our faith, or become full at rage at the universe, if these normal occurrences had truly been known and integrated.

Yet, how many people are totally unprepared for a death or a disability to strike near at hand? How is it that so many of us come out of these experiences shaken, even destroyed?  Why is it that we, the most intelligent species on the planet, seem to be the only creature who has difficulty accepting the natural elements of life and death in the environment in which we live; indeed, the only environment we as a species have ever known?

"So, I'll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end
And flowers never bend
With the rainfall."

I would like to know life as I would a lover - to know her good and bad sides, to accept her in all of her aspects, so that it is she I truly come to know, and not an illusion.