The Art of Dying
My Earthly Dance with Death

Toward the end of his life, Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the brightest lights in Western history, concluded: “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”

We come into this world carrying a death sentence. It’s the natural law of things: what begins must end. Even babies.

Of course—and I remember this well—for a child, a teenager, and even into one’s twenties and perhaps thirties too, there is no such thing as death. You’ve heard the word, of course, nodded in the direction of the concept, maybe even attended a funeral or two, but this thing, this end of things, still only involves others—animals and such, and old people.

Even closer encounters with death seem to slip you by barely rustling a feather, raising no warning.

I went to a small country grade school in northern Sweden. Many of these kids were brought to this school and were, some hours later, returned home by an old, gray bus—must have been pre-war (World War II, if not I).

Winter days were cold and the final bell rang in the dark. Kids, glad to survive yet another school day, would at first line up as instructed by one of the attending teachers but soon, as always, jockey for position to get out of the frost-biting air and into the warm bus ahead of the rest—the bigger kids usually the winners.

The same was true this afternoon. Only this day, one little kid was shoved a little too carelessly or hard by a bigger ditto and first slipped on the ice underfoot and then slid all the way under the bus, which was just then backing up: right rear wheel climbing the little body crushing the little chest and lungs.

I was told that he lived long enough to actually reach the hospital, but not much longer.

I have often thought about the kid who delivered that final shove. What a thing to live with. Perhaps he himself was shoved, but one of these children still knows that he or she killed that smaller child. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that my immortality survived even such a close and real death. It was the buzz of the schoolyard for days, of course: death as a topic of fascination—but not as any kind of threat, for Death only happens to others—this one death very much a case in point.

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A year or so later, in the same small community, a mentally ill young boy’s dad killed his son with an ax—to spare the son a life of suffering went the guessing—then tried to kill himself with a rifle (unsuccessfully). Instead, he managed to drag himself (less a jaw, reportedly) all the way to a nearby creek, where he (successfully this time) drowned himself instead.

Two more deaths as topic of school-yard fascination. Even if local, very much others though.

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An old house not far from where I lived sported an attic where a rumored someone had hung himself, by that very beam I was told by the pointing teller. Ah, historical other. Threatless.

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Dad’s dad had died before I was born. More harmless history.

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A horse, too old to do the local farmer any good, was slaughtered—or so I was told by Mom. I didn’t see him killed but never saw the horse around after that, so I’m sure she was right.

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I did witness a butcher shoot a pig in the forehead, to then probe the bullet hole with a long, flexible stick to some purpose I have yet to surmise. The pig, led up to the man with the gun, knew what was coming, I think so. They’re smart, pigs. Terrified eyes all over the place.

But these are just animals. Animals do die. We know that. Humans, especially this human, don’t.

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My maternal grandmother was intensely Christian. We visited her every summer for five or six of my childhood years. Month-long visits, during which I got to hear all about death—no, not about death, about Heaven and about Hell. Heaven and Hell. Over and over. Over and over. Mostly Hell.

For some strange reason, though, that seemed to immunize me against death—for, surely, you—I mean, how could you die if you survived to experience the Heavenly bliss that she sang and prayed and preached to me about; or, alternatively—if you had been bad, as was my habit—the eternal fires of Hell (from where we sinners can see the angels up there, feet dangling over cloud edges, looking down upon us burning victims and not even feeling sorry for us since we only got what we deserved—Grandma’s take on things, stressed at least twice a day, with examples). So, dying, I sort of viscerally concluded, wasn’t about ceasing, it was about leaving this room for one better, or one worse.

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I had left Sweden by the time my dad’s mother died. In my thirties by then. Too distant. Far-away deaths don’t impact so much.

Two years later my mom’s mother died, too (gone home to Jesus, as my sister suggested). Impactlessly.

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Then, in 1995—I’m in Denver at the time, work-related training—I get a call from my brother. I know something important must be up since he had tracked me down. It’s about my dad.

What about him? He’s dead.

At 72?

I flew back to Sweden for his funeral. My strongest memory is seeing him, as life-like as anything, sleeping in that pretty coffin resting on two low trestles in that pretty and very understanding chapel. I kept looking at his shirted and tied and jacketed chest, which did not move, not even a bit, not even a millimeter, not even once.

So, that’s what death is.

No motion. No movement.

We had not been that close, my father and I. Not really. So, death, again, even though this corpse had been my father, failed to impact.

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A few years later, on a summer visit to Sweden, I decided to look up my first real girlfriend—well, as real as girlfriends get for a very inexperienced-in-such-matters sixteen-year-old. Can’t seem to find her though.

I finally managed to track down her then-best friend, to ask her: Where’s Barbro these days?

She died.

What? At 40-something?

Yes.

Now, that one was a little too close to the mark for comfort. People you have kissed should not be dead. Not yet, anyway. I still wonder what happened to her. I didn’t get the details. Didn’t think of asking. I’m thinking she must have smoked a lot.

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I hugged my mom for the last time a summer’s day or so before I returned to the U.S. from my last Sweden trip. I lived in Coeur d’Alene at the time—getting “there and back” was quite the project, but that’s another story.

Early next year I get a rare email from my sister, where the Subject simply said, “Mamma”.

A heading like that says everything. I didn’t really have to read the mail. And yes, she had passed.

But she, like my dad, had passed distantly—no direct impact.

Besides, I had been away from Sweden now for going on forty years, most strings terminally severed, so Swedish events didn’t really touch me that deeply, not even deaths.

They decided not to have a funeral per se, but only a memorial service and a scattering of ashes or some such. I did not fly back for that.

I do remember that last hug though. It, more than death, touched me. Mom, as I entered her room in the elder care facility, was lying on her bed as usual.

Hi Mom, what’re you doing?

I’m milking the cows, she said, memory realer than the present these days.

Suffering from dementia, she had grown a little gun-shy and she flinched and tried to scramble out of the way when I leaned over her bed to hug her where she lay.

I’m just giving you a hug, Mom.

She understood that. Okay, then. She relaxed. And I hugged. And she hugged back.

Hugging over: I will never forget this, she said. And smiled.

Forgotten by the next day.

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Here’s the most unexpected death: I had worked with Sam for several years in Los Angeles—this is before I moved to Coeur d’Alene. He was my age, perhaps even a year or two younger than I.

One day, I’m in Coeur d’Alene now, I am cc’ed on an email from one of Sam’s clients, asking for contributions to Sam’s funeral.

Sam’s Funeral?

I called his wife right away. Yes, yes, he had passed. In his sleep. She always left for work (hellish commute) before Sam rose, so it was their son who found him dead before he went to school. He called his mom: When did you last speak to Dad? asked the son (yes, that was the first thing out of his, to my thinking, very weird mouth).

Why? she asked.

He’s dead.

Jesus. Talk about softening the blow.

Died in his sleep.

Now here’s the odder thing still. Sam and I were always playfully (and sometimes not entirely playfully) competitive. Each wanted, subtly to be sure, to best the other, if even by a little. On realizing that Sam had died, indeed died, my initial knee-jerk reaction was, and I kid you not: Well, if Sam can do it, it can’t be that hard.

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Here’s the death that shook me the most: I got an air rifle for my fourteenth birthday. Dad, not a very good shot, showed me how to shoot house sparrows. He missed them all. Lesson over, he handed me the rifle and went inside. Too cold out here or some such. I’ll see if there’s any coffee left.

I aimed at a few of them myself, no harm done. Like father like son.

Then I spotted a beautiful little great tit in the very top of one of our old birches. Just him and the gray sky behind. Not a care in the world.

I aimed and shot. The bird remained stationary for a second or two, as if deciding what to do next, then succumbed to gravity, fell forward and down through the autumn air the ten or so meters to the ground to land at my feet with an incriminating (though very soft) thud. I bent down and picked it up. Had I just stunned it? No, the hole was smack in the middle of the sweet little chest. Some blood. Dead as anything, though still warm in my hand.

I didn’t cry, I don’t think I did, but I was a little shocked. I had killed. And I had killed a beautiful little thing. A very beautiful now dead thing who had done me no harm whatsoever. In my hand. Not breathing.

I did the only thing I could think of and buried the little bird by the root of that tree.

I told no one about this.

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These days death, if not knocking on the door, is coming up the driveway.

I’ve never learned to respect him; have never been afraid of death. At first, he was never real. And then I learned that dead and ceased were not synonyms, for there was living past the event, I knew that—whether in Heaven or Hell or wherever.

And now, as a long-time Theravada-Hinayana-Zen-Advaita Seeker, I have experienced more than one beautiful certainty that death, as we commonly see him, does not exist, at all. Not in the least. Rumors of us ceasing wildly exaggerated.

Maya.

Were Da Vinci around, I could give him a few pointers.

These days I am more curious than anything. What will Death have to teach me?

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