Conversations with a Soul, page 21
Yet the Neanderthals have not finished tantalizing our imagination!
At other sites fresh possibilities are fired-up by the mysterious arrangement of cave bear skulls.
We know from cave bear skeletons that they were monstrous twenty foot tall versions of Grizzly bears with razor sharp claws and huge teeth. These carnivores must have struck terror in the hearts of their hunters.
Never the less, at several widely dispersed sites, significant quantities of cave bear bones and skulls have been uncovered. At Drachenlock, in Switzerland, in a hollowed out stone chest covered by a slab of rock, seven bear skulls appear to have been arranged with their muzzles facing the entrance to the cave. Deeper into the cave, six more bear skulls were found in niches along the cave walls. Perhaps this arrangement of the skulls is purely coincidental, possibly because someone simply needed to find a convenient place to unload an armful of bones, so they plunked them down on an opportune shelf. We all know the temptation that a flat surface holds when our arms are full and we need to put something down!
On the other hand who can miss the stirring of our imagination when we 'hear' a hint that the arrangement of the bear skulls may have been deliberate and rooted in behavior that went significantly deeper than merely tidy housekeeping?
Were the skulls, perhaps, trophies, set up to display the prowess of the hunters, an ancient precursor to the stuffed moose head above the fireplace?
Or is there another, even deeper level?
Could these creatures, so terrible and terrifying in life, have managed to step over the boundaries of life and death and invade their hunter’s sleep?
Did these skulls have the power to summon the kind of terror which, in daylight hours, still evoked awe and wonder and that over a long time morphed into a world ruled over by mystery and fear? Was this the very first acknowledgement of some mysterious power that didn’t terminate in death and, instead, was strengthened by it? Was it a reminder that the spirit of these terrible animals watched over the cave and in some inexplicable manner, had decreed it to be a sacred place?
Had the Neanderthals started on the long road that would eventually lead to a belief in spirits and the powers of the gods that could reach beyond the silent barrier erected by death?
Much less dependent upon our imagination, is the evidence that these strange prehistoric beings also practiced compassion towards the elderly and the wounded:
The remains of an old man found in a cave in Iraq led to an interesting conclusion. An examination of the bones indicated that some time before his death, he had sustained multiple injuries. The left eye socket was fractured, the lower right arm had been amputated and the right foot and lower leg had been severely injured. However, new bone growth on the leading edges of the fractures indicates that he survived for some time after the trauma. This could only have happened if he had been cared for and helped by others.
Perhaps the urge to provide for their dead was a natural offshoot from the early stirrings of community and compassion.
The male adult in the La Ferrassie cave site was buried with several animal bones, bone splinters and flint flakes. In and of itself these bits of burial flotsam may not be terribly significant, except that the pattern is repeated in burial site after burial site. Neanderthal burial sites have enough bones and tools to lead one to suspect that, apart from the act of burying a dead body, something else was going on, something to do with more than merely the disposition of a corpse.
At the Shanidar IV burial site in Northern Iraq, the 46,000-year-old, fossilized remains of a 35-year-old male was discovered. Soil samples from around the site indicate a very high concentration of pollen from several types of wild flowers leading Professor Richard Leaky to suggest:
From the orderly distribution of grains around the fossilized remains there is no question that the flowers were arranged deliberately and did not simply topple into the grave, as was believed, as the body was being covered.92
At many burial sites, large stone slabs covered the remains, which had been interred with food and tools, and buried in a flexed fetal position. Discoveries like these led one anthropologist to write:
Evidence of this source clearly indicates that Neanderthal man believed in life after death and it was probably not unlike the life he lived on earth, since he seemed to be trying to help his corpses along their journeys with tools and food. Death itself appears to have been regarded as a kind of sleep, since corpses were carefully arranged in sleeplike positions. 93
The discovery of fire pits alongside grave sites suggests that the funeral rites incorporated an early version of a 'wake', where relatives and tribes folk would gather in the presence of the deceased to cook meat and share a communal meal and then place food and flowers in the grave to sustain the dead person on a journey.
In 200,000 years not a great deal has changed in our struggle to cope with death’s intrusive sting!
We customarily have nothing better to offer those who grieve than a plate of sandwiches, a few feeble words and a vase of flowers; simple gifts that still have the power to sustain someone in grief. We frequently refer to those who have died as having 'passed on' hinting at a journey initiated by death. We grow flowers around graves or leave bouquets at our memorials, sometimes merely makeshift shrines, and the flowers help us to articulate our grief when the words won’t come or when they do they somehow seem hopelessly inadequate.
Several years ago I was visiting friends in Scotland shortly after the announcement of Princess Dianna’s death. The nation, plunged into mourning, struggled to grasp the tragic news. Then, almost immediately, everywhere, alongside monuments, propped up against historically significant buildings, pinned to fences and mounded at Holyrood Palace the people brought and left flowers: sometimes beautifully arranged in magnificent bouquets, sometimes very simply left in bottles or vases but all witnessing to a people’s love. There was nothing else the mourners could do to give expression to their pain and assert their fragile hope except bring flowers and strangely enough, the flowers felt like a powerful rebuke to the dark powers of death that had claimed their princess.
'Why?'
'Why, why, why?'
And I have never been able to answer the question!
Usually torn from the heart of someone in deep pain, I don’t think I ever found a way to bring comfort to their suffering. Being an ordained minister, I felt I ought to have some wisdom, a few words that would wipe away the agony of loss.
There never were.
I intuitively knew an attempt at a logical answer would not come close to answering the why instead it would simply manage to demean their pain, as though, reason ought to bring an end to grief. I also knew that eventually the questions would lose most of their severity and become woven into the fabric of their being - but the experience would always be there.
For some of them the pain would eventually be transformed into a gentle graciousness and a depth of character; leaving them more sensitive to others and stronger for having endured the loss, thereby denying death its power to completely destroy a person’s vitality. For others, it would become a gaping wound that would poison their outlook on life and yield to death the ultimate power to destroy.
The question is particularly potent when the manner in which death claims someone feels all wrong and violates our sense of justice, or our belief in the goodness and orderliness of life.
I remember speaking with a woman shortly after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She confessed to an overwhelming sense of outrage that her body, which she had cared for and cared about, which had thus far behaved in a trustworthy and predictable manner, should suddenly turn against her and initiate the possibility of her death.
Her cry of why had nothing to do with a need for information about the clinical nature of her disease, but was rooted in a deep sense of betrayal that led her to question her dependence in the dependability of Life, her faith in God and the grounds for having any confidence in the future.
She eventually beat the cancer but she had to revaluate many of the assumptions upon which she had relied.
Her struggle to live with the frailty and uncertainty of being human led to a remarkable gentleness with others, especially towards those who faced what she had faced. She also learned to embrace a healthy measure of ambivalence when it came to questions about the future, even though she never lost her enthusiasm for life.
She reordered her priorities, such that in her relationships with others she demanded a far greater level of honesty than that which she had accepted prior to the diagnoses and treatment.
Furthermore, having looked death in the eye she understood that one day she would lose the freedom to reach into the future which made the present all the more precious. She became impatient with procrastination and pointless delays and railed against the promise of intimate moments that were set aside, often for no good reason.
In order to live alongside of death, she had to restructure the terms through which she engaged life. There had never been even the vaguest hint that one day she would die, now she had to take account of that reality.
Like her, I have need of a model, a structure, a common configuration, and some way of accommodating to the stark reality that one day I will die. I sense a need to put death into a context that will keep it in place and prevent it from overflowing into every lived moment.
I refuse to have my life surrounded and given meaning by death; instead, I choose to live my death contextualized by the wonder and the grand vistas painted by life.
However it comes, I want my death to be more than merely the winding down of a biological mechanism. Just as I have wanted my life to have meaning and purpose, beyond merely a name on a birth certificate and another on an undertaker’s log, so do I want my death to have some significance, at the very least, to me.
A good friend helped me to focus on this issue of dying with significance from the point of view of constructing a 'bucket list.' He wrote:
I had a conversation with a friend the other day who said he was going to lead a retreat around the idea of a bucket list. I paused for a moment and then said, "I hope that you are not going to focus only on the idea of a bucket list consisting of big, dramatic, perhaps risky, costly things. I hope you'll give room for people having a drive to being kind or generous, spending time in the park with the neighbour families, visiting the kids abandoned at the sub-acute hospital around the corner, etc.
Because I am a lover of life, I have never felt more alive than when clambering over one horizon after another, so that I might explore what mysteries and wonders I have not yet encountered. Sometimes in pursuit of discovering a place I have never been before, sometimes to explore the boundaries of human relationships, and sometimes simply to dream about the possibilities hidden in tomorrow, of which I understand very little. For these reasons, I cherish a hope that death will come as the ending of one journey of exploration and the beginning of another.
This means that I need a mental image of death within which I am free to ask questions as well as express pain, fear, anger or whatever emotions the experience arouses without yielding to a nihilistic destruction of my faith in life; nor being overwhelmed by cynicism.
I know I cannot answer many of the questions, and that my best attempts will always be provisional because life is always changing. I also know that what answers I do manage to frame need to have some tough integrity to them. I remember recoiling after reading a scroll at the entrance to a mausoleum suggesting that the mourners should not think of their loved ones as dead but rather as having been set free to enjoy the park-like ambience of that place!
I refuse to live with the delusion that death is a matter of leaving this earth for a stroll in a garden, although I would be quite happy to be proved wrong!
Perhaps it is enough simply to ask the questions, for in asking I bring a certain legitimacy and objectivity to my struggle and then I am free to walk around my questions, to weigh them and try to understand each nuance brought to life in the question.
Is death primarily about destruction and disintegration? Is it the prelude to some form of reincarnation or is it about being born anew into other realities, in the same way that rain evaporates to become the next cloud and the next rain shower, each time changing its structure, yet not ceasing to be? And how shall one discover the truth about dying, and more importantly, surmise what lies beyond death? What could possibly constitute evidence when we come to chart the territory that lies beyond the experience of dying, that 'other world' which is completely unknown?
Or is it really, completely unknown? Have not other cultures and beliefs passed on to us hints and insights in their attempts to deal with the same questions we ask ourseves?
I believe we all have questions like these lodged somewhere in our psyche, each legitimate and wanting to be articulated; each yearning to be shared with a few significant persons, even though the sharing frequently opens the door to yet more questions.
What strange forms these terminal questions take and how varied their origins! Sometimes they are prompted by the death of another, particularly if that other is a close friend or relative, sometimes they just pop into our heads, just there without rhyme or reason. Sometimes the questions arrive as a response to something we’ve read or a few words lodged in a conversation, which refuse to disappear and be forgotten, and sometimes they accost us because we have been summoned to bring comfort to another in grief and suddenly we are brought face to face with our lack of answers.
I am not alone with my questions for different cultures have adopted behaviours viewed as an appropriate response to the experience of death almost always based on their particular view of death. Wearing dark clothing, for example, or a black arm band for a specified period of time, is common practice in those cultures where death is viewed as the 'grim reaper,' the personification of tragedy, the destroyer who lays waste and separates those who have dared to love from their beloved.
Conversely, Hinduism views death as a turning point and excessive mourning is thought to inhibit the progress of the soul, hence white, rather than dark clothing is regarded as appropriate. Judaism has designed a carefully constructed series of steps, based mainly on periods of time, to assist mourners to re-enter the community and pick-up the threads of their lives again, reflecting the Jewish view that:
Death is a natural process. Our deaths, like our lives, have meaning and are all part of G-d's plan. In addition, we have a firm belief in an afterlife, a world to come, where those who have lived a worthy life will be rewarded.94
Because the experience of death is so universal, different theologies, mythologies and cultures have much to teach us, particularly when our Western culture is so short on answers. So that rather than limiting my discussion about death to a single religious system, I have chosen to be open to different opinions, trusting that our common humanity is powerful enough to bridge the differences. After all, beyond the myopia of all fundamentalist dogma, who dares to claim the final word especially when the subject is so impenetrable?
You have already met the Neanderthal people, whose approach to death holds an inexplicable fascination for me. It’s certainly amongst the earliest records of a people confronting the experience of grief. Denied written explanations and the logic demanded by writing, we are left with the stark evidence of how they behaved and what they did in the presence of death. If we would understand how the Neanderthals dealt with death we are forced to listen to our own hearts, to surrender to personal experience and imagination in order to understand them.
We move now to reflect on two other ancient views of death, and as we might expect, wrapped in the strange language and world view, we will meet ourselves for the struggle with death is a universal one.
Any conversation about death, must of necessity, address grief.
I have often listened to profuse apologies, offered by men and women for yielding to powerful emotions when faced by the death of someone beloved. At such times I’ve wondered why they felt the need to apologize. Was their understanding of death such that they felt they ought to rise above grief, or was it because they felt obligated to spare others from a display of their pain? Either way I frequently found myself wishing that we had a model of death that included legitimate expressions of pain, a feature sadly lacking in our 'stiff upper lip' Western European culture, where signs of grieving tend to initiate acute embarrassment in those witnessing someone’s pain.
Different cultures have approached grief in differing ways, almost all of them working to accommodate the human experience of mourning. The ancient Greek and Roman worlds even went so far as to legitimize public displays of mourning, and frequently assigning to women specific roles in the ritual expressions of grief. The Old Testament contains numerous accounts of men and women lamenting the loss of a loved one. It is impossible to escape the contemporary agony of a father who cries over the body of his son, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee.
That cry is a universal one and is echoed in the mythical Epic of Gilgamesh, possibly the oldest written story on earth. Inscribed on twelve clay tablets, this ancient Sumerian document, wrestles with the themes of death and grief.
The principle character in the epic, Gilgamesh, is a semi-divine figure that was fathered by a god and born of a human woman.
The story begins with an account of how, enthroned as king of Uruk, Gilgamesh proved to be arrogant and hopeless, much preferring the life of a playboy above that of serving his people. Using his royal authority he spent his days claiming sexual privileges from any woman he desired, including those promised in marriage to another.
The good citizens of Uruk soon had enough of Gilgamesh’s irresponsible and rapine behaviour and complained to the sky-god Anu that Gilgamesh was destroying their city. The gods heard the people’s cry and one of them, Aruru, created a foil for Gilgamesh, the wild man Enkidu.
