There’s an intensity in the life of the dying that maybe the living can learn from

Death. It’s the end of everything. Or maybe not – maybe the beginning of everything. Beginning or end, all or nothing, it’s unknown, nothing more so, and terrifying on that account if on no other, and it’s waiting, there’s no escape, except in thought (or thoughtlessness) – and that exit narrows as we grow older, and with Japan as a whole growing older than any nation in history ever has, it’s time, maybe, to look at death with new eyes – the eyes of age and– is it possible? – of hope. How, asks Shukan Gendai (April 27-May 4), can we die beautifully?

We should mention at the outset one other potential escape – a will-o’-the-wisp till lately but now (say some) scientifically attainable: immortality. Molecular genetics, operating at cellular level, can (potentially) retard, ultimately prevent, aging. Perhaps, speculate avant-garde thinkers in the field, the first immortal has already been born. Immortality may soon be a matter of course. Death will be a thing of the past, and our descendants will wonder how we ever lived with such a dark shadow hanging over us.

What a shame to be on the cusp of such bright promise yet doomed all the same. Small children possibly excepted, we’re all in the same boat, the death boat, and the best we can do is make the best of it. We’re back to Shukan Gendai’s “dying beautifully.”

 It takes heroic qualities. Its examples suggest that such qualities reside in all of us, untapped in most of us, death no longer the intimate presence it long was, thanks to peace and medical advances and modern attitudes that situate the human best in good living rather than in good dying; ours all the same, a resource to draw on as the shadows lengthen.

Katsura Utamaru (1936-2018) spent most of his life onstage, a performer of traditional Japanese rakugo monologues. In 2010 he fell ill. Lung cancer was the diagnosis. Life became a fight for life. He didn’t win, but he invested losing with a dignity perhaps more noble than victory.

Performance was his life; performance would be his death. In and out of hospital, he performed whenever he was physically able, even sometimes when not, or barely.

“My teacher had a mission,” his disciple Katsura Utaharu tells the magazine. “Rakugo is one of the traditional Japanese arts. He would leave behind him a memory worthy of it.”

“Three months before his death,” Utaharu continues, “he gave the performance of his life” – at the National Arts Theater in Tokyo. Oxygen tubes stuck up his nose, he quipped, “Having no oxygen is worse than having no money.” Laugh, he invited his audience. Laugh with me, laugh at death, laugh in death’s face, it’s healthy, it’s fun.

Japan as a culture has had an unusual relationship with death down the ages. Buddhism taught an endless cycle of birth and death that, far from being a comfort, was a monotonous, futile, endlessly turning wheel, satori or enlightenment the one release from it, life’s only worthy goal. Later on the poet Yoshida no Kenko (1283-1350), in his classic miscellany “Grasses of Idleness,” wrote, “If man were never to fade like the dew… but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” And the early 18th-century “Hagakure,” a military treatise idealizing bushido, the Way of the Warrior, says, “Only when you constantly live as though already a corpse will you be able to find freedom in the martial Way, and fulfill your duties without fault throughout your life.”

Fear of death is the price we pay – maybe not the only one – for the large brain that is nature’s gift to us – or curse upon us. It gives us two faculties evolved to a pitch beyond anything we need for survival: memory and imagination. We remember the past and imagine the future – remember the deaths we’ve witnessed, imagine our own.

It is possible to look forward to death with joy as to something wonderful, but it requires an intensity of religious or transcendental faith which modern lifestyles do not nurture. Fear, on the other hand, has instinctual support. All living creatures fight death – the beasts with tooth and claw, us with medicine, surgery, armed force, hygiene and sundry other fruits of the big brain – them face to face, us in anticipation rising sometimes to dread. Animals have little sense of time. Their memories are short, their future measurable in minutes. Would it were so with us!

We would be spared much – useless regrets, profitless worry, pointless fear. What’s the best defense against the gnawing fear of death, growing more acute as age draws us closer if not less so as age confers (as it’s supposed to) wisdom? At the most practical level, get your affairs in order, Shukan Gendai advises. Do it while still healthy, though you’d rather not. Write your will, settle old scores, make preparatory nursing care arrangements, decide how much life-preserving technology you want applied to you.

Then, relax. Resign yourself to death’s inevitability. Is it horrible? Marvelous? For all our science, we know no more about it than our remotest ancestors just down from the trees. You have to die to know it, and then it’s too late – you’re no longer you. Or maybe you are. Anyway. The following simple story comes to Shukan Gendai courtesy of Daihaku Okouchi, chief priest of the Ganshoji Temple in Osaka. Nursing care is not a traditional priestly responsibility but he’s made it his, visiting cancer patients in hospital and at home, bringing what comfort he can.

A woman in her 70s, her cancer terminal, is in a palliative care facility, and on the table in her room is a digital camera with which she records life passing by beneath her window. Watching the priest examining the images, she saw from his face he was missing the point. She smiled. “To you it’s just the same old stuff, isn’t it? But to me every day is utterly unlike every other.”

There’s an intensity in the life of the dying that maybe the living can learn from.

Michael Hoffman is the author of “arimasen.”

© Japan Today