CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter
I used to go to a deep-muscle therapist. She was great. She got me straightened up. She saved me a lot of agony. We became friends, in a professional way--since I am a story-teller, she was interested in how I “sculpt” a story. For she was a sculptor, both of materials, and of bodies.
She came to the US from Norway when she was twenty to pursue that dream of being a sculptor. She was successful. She became an excellent and celebrated sculptor.
“But,” she said, “I realized that while I created other bodies with my sculpting, I was neglecting my own body, and my own soul, for I had no relationships. I was in my studio all day, alone. I figured that since I knew anatomy because of my sculpting, I could learn to sculpt bodies, and that way I would have contact with people. But it’s not as easy as you would think. Here you are, lying on the table. You can’t get away from me. You have to talk to me. But I think most of my clients would prefer to drop their bodies off with me and come back and pick them up the next day. They want me to have a relationship with their body, but they don’t want to have to relate to their own body.”
Preparing the body to die seemed contradictory to me when I first thought of it. Sure, there are the details of what to do with our body when we no longer need it. Donate it to a medical school for research. Donate organs so others can see or walk or live. Make arrangements with a funeral home. Etc.
Surely there’s nothing else
to do, though, is there? I mean, isn’t that the way we know a person is dead,
that the body is no longer “right?” Isn’t getting the body “right” a way of
staying alive instead of a way to prepare to die?
Yes, living in a healthy way is mostly for keeping the body alive. But it is also for easing the way of death. I like the book title by John H. Bland, Live Long, Die Fast. We die “better” if we keep the body in good physical shape. We do this not just for ourselves but for our loved ones.
There is an emotional element in preparing our bodies for death, though. There are a lot of ways this can go wrong, but in general, the better condition our bodies are in, the easier and simpler our death will be. Not the actual moment of death, I suppose, but the process of leading up to it.
I want to be quite careful not to be “judgy” here, of people who die from long debilitating diseases or conditions. There are dozens of problems that can come into our bodies through no fault or bad decision of our own. And certainly, the point of keeping our bodies in shape for death is not so we’ll look good in a casket!
Our bodies have “minds,” if you will, of their own. [If you don’t believe that, watch what my body does when I tell it to walk in a straight line!] Bodies have memories that may be lost to our brains.
But preparing the body to
die is not just about making for an easier death. These bodies have been
through a lot with us. They have tried to serve us well, often against bad
odds. So often it seems that we are fighting with our bodies. They are trying
to get sick, and we’re trying to get well. They are a nuisance, a frustration
to deal with. They want attention while we just want them to leave us alone.
I think this is good to do at any age, but before we die, it is important that we have a whole relationship with our bodies, that we accept them as they are and have been, that we thank them for helping us through these years of life.
John Robert McFarland
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