Fates Worse Than Death

This painting was made right after the death of a dear matriarch in my life and in our church, Carolee Britt. Her favorite color was pink. At Christmas the very air in her house seemed pink. She died of cancer and there was a great deal of grief in our family and community. The following Sunday, as this painting began to emerge, I realized it was the party happening in heaven. We see a pink veil, the yellow fall of healing, all that confetti, and a hint of the ghostly white shadows of those who have just passed. It’s the party at the border between states of being. It’s the reason my Great Aunt Winnie, the last of her sibling to go, was angry at the doctor when she kept getting better after the he told her she would probably not survive. It’s the thing saints look forward to. 

I remember my parents on road trips telling us that there was always a party going at the border between states. Of course, we were always asleep when they crossed the state border so we never saw it. We never see this party at the border between states of being, so we forget that heaven doesn’t have a problem with death. In fact, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.” Psalm 116:15

Missing from all the major political debates right now is a fundamental truth that no one wants to admit; Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person.

What do you expect to happen when you die? Eternity in heaven? Reincarnation? Or perhaps nothing at all? Even nothing at all is objectively better than the lives many people face. That so many persist is a testimony to the incredible power of hope. Still, thousands of people choose death every day.

Refugees fleeing war in the Middle East are willingly embarking on a voluntary death march with only the tiniest sliver of hope for a better life. 

The woman who is having an abortion has definitely imagined it, not having the physical or emotional resources to provide for two (or more since the majority of abortions are done for women who already have children) people. I brought four daughters into this world and I definitely imagined it, but I had family/community resources many women lack. 

The person trying to escape a coercive controlling relationship knows it. 

The senior confronting Alzheimer’s is imagining it. 

The person with stage 4 cancer is deciding what to do about it. 

The parent with the profoundly disabled child going bankrupt because of medical bills is living it. Stressed beyond reason and wondering how they'll care for their child as their resources slip away.

The teacher going through active shooter drills with a classroom full of students and the prepper hoarding guns and food are both practicing for it. 

The cop who has to assume all guns are real when he’s facing a teenager lives in fear of it. 

The undocumented immigrant suffering deprivation and exploitation for the sake of transplanting their family to American soil is escaping it. 

The high school senior weighing their potential earnings with a degree, against the skyrocketing cost of college, considers the possibility of debt becoming a lifetime of indentured servitude and shies away from it. 

The alcoholic/drug addict is self medicating for it. 

The military recruit is training to fight it. 

It's out there for all of us, the thing that could make life unbearable. If you can’t imagine anything worse than death, then you have lived a profoundly privileged life. 

If we as a culture acknowledged this truth we’d be punishing rapists and human traffickers the same as murders. We would defrock and disbar judges who routinely give harsher punishments to people of color or the poor than to white and/or wealthy people who commit the same crimes. Slavery, crimes against liberty, especially those committed by judges, are every bit as appalling as murder. We’d be jailing fund managers that defraud people of their retirements for the same deprivation. 

Our politicians are risking their necks right now taking money from billionaires and corporate interests to continue to allow the exploitation of workers and our environment. A day will come when the balance tips and number of workers who feel a sudden death is preferable to the slow squelching of life between menial work, poor health, and unpaid bills exceeds the number of workers who are too tired to try to change this miserable destiny. On that day the French Revolution will be eclipsed because America always does things bigger. 

You can dismiss my examples and swear that you would never agree, but until it’s your life in the balance you really can’t say. You can call suicide a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but unless we make drastic systemic changes to our government, the majority of these problems will be permanent for the people who face them. 

We’ve had this phrase “fate worse than death” in the English lexicon since at least 1741, usually in reference to rape. But when men made the laws, the punishment for consensual sodomy was worse than for raping a woman. A woman's fate was worse than death, but their rapist faced little or no punishment at all. The things the privileged makers of the law feared being done to them were punished far more harshly than the crimes they suspected they might be capable of committing. For our laws to be gender balanced, our lawmaking institutions must become gender balanced!

For those Christians who still disbelieve, even God imagined a fate for humanity worse than death, or he would not have sent his son to die instead. If you read your Bible closely you will find that God/Jesus is never bothered by death. Even when he was called to heal Lazarus and informed his friend died before he got there, he didn’t weep until he saw the grief of the living. He was not moved to tears by the death of his friend, but by the suffering of the living. Would he have raised Lazarus for his own sake? Because of his own sense of loss? That would be strange for Jesus, who knew that his friend had passed to eternal life. But he was moved, and throughout the Bible God is always moved, by the suffering of the living and the horrible things we do to each other. We need to care more about loving each other while we live.

If we are truly pro-life, rather than depriving people of their freedom to choose death, we should be doing everything in our power to make life a better choice for everyone.