You know how aum — that most fundamental and potent seed (or bija) mantra — is made up of three sounds? As I understand it, the “Aaaaaaa…” is the sound of creation; “Uuuuuuu” represents the sustenance of that creation; and “Mmmmmm” the sound of destruction or the ending of creation. In other words, it’s the sound of death. I’ve noticed that often when I chant this mantra in groups, people seem to put a lot of emphasis on the first two sounds. Often the “mmmm” is truncated and, frankly, kinda weak sauce. For me, this is a perfect allegory for how many of us — steeped in the deathphobia of Western modernity — treat our own mortality, and endings in general. For this reason, I always make sure I leave plenty of breath in my lungs to close out my aum’s with a clear and humble: “Mmmmmmmmmm.”

I’ve been reading about and spending a lot of time contemplating death, life, non-life (whatever this is) and something theologian Beatriz Marovich calls lifedeath. One of the main explorations of Marovich’s book –Sister Death – is around the way that Christianity has propagated an understanding of the relationship between life and death as primarily one of enmity. Marovich writes, “… this dominant political theology — the political theology of death — presents a bifurcated view of life and death. It intimates that one can have a death that is disconnected from life, and a life that is disconnected from death. Life is on the side of God, and death is not.” The author goes on to describe this polemic further: “…when Christianity claims life itself to be in alignment with its own vision of God, those who Christianity holds to be enemies rather than friends (such as non-Christians) are conscripted to the realm of death – they become part of a constellated negative that pools together Western metaphysical dimensions of abjections such as privation, sin, evil, fleshiness, animality, and blackness.”

There’s something in Marovich’s nuanced critique of worldviews which constantly pit life against death in an existential battle which resonates with me on a deep level. Sister Death, at least from my perspective, doesn’t prescriptively try to tell readers what death is or moralize around how humans should relate to mortality or the figure of death. But the premise that dominant religious and political systems have very often framed the relationship between life and death as one of enmity is helping me understand something about my own response to the death of our child. 

It’s been seven years to the day since I learned that baby Rafa had died in my womb and that I was a living, breathing death-carrier. Over the years, I’ve had many opportunities to feel into my relationship with death and one of the things that I felt a lot of resentment and anger about is the cultural tendency during these times to frequently lift up that which is light / living / ascendant as “good” and to denigrate darkness / death / descent as “evil.” In a critique of Grace Jantzen’s writings on natality and birth, Marovich writes, “… to lift up birth as a force on the side of life, rather than the side of death, only serves to feed this enmity.” Thus, the same seems true about the desire for death to have an equal or greater “place” in the eyes of modern, Western humans. And I have definitely climbed up on a pedestal of righteous indignation about this from time to time. Sister Death is helping me understand that if we didn’t see life and death as enemies, maybe I would feel less of a drive to lift death up over life. The view that life and death are like sisters just feels “true” to me. They are deeply and intimately entangled. They will never be separated. This does not mean that these two have a simple relationship – there is antagonism and even competition, but fundamentally they are not enemies, they are not at war with one another. 

This makes me ponder whether my obsession with criticizing people’s desire to always be glorifying light and life is necessary. I feel very drawn to this cosmovision in which death could never exist without life and life can never be itself without its sister, death (I even talked about this on camera in Spanish one time). There is no need to have one be greater than the other.

At the same time, I’ve been experiencing intense existential anxiety lately and experimenting with new ways of moving towards that anxiety, rather than attempting to avoid it by being endlessly busy. In a recent somatic practice related to being with uncertainty I recognized that my fear of empty spaces – horror vacuui – verges on a kind of terror. I really have no idea about the source of that terror and the resulting anxiety. I don’t consciously feel afraid of death, but I have to wonder if my socio-cultural conditioning hasn’t inculcated me with some abysmal fear of the unknown. And what greater unknown is there than death?

Through all of this, I’m coming to feel that maybe we humans just take death a bit too seriously. Or something like that. 

I’ve seen a lot of things in my recent travels that have made me consider the human experience as compared to that of other “living” beings. I’ve watched flowers grow, blossom, begin to decline and rot, and die. I’ve seen huge, old, moss-covered stumps decaying in the most beautiful ways. I’ve witnessed three-legged sea turtles laying their eggs in the open on a black sand beach because they couldn’t dig much of a hole with their lone back flipper. I’ve seen vultures and dogs eating those same eggs as they were being laid… and the turtles didn’t seem to be grief-striken about it. I’ve observed life life-ing in the strange and magnificent way that she does and death present within and all around that life. “We often have difficulty understanding where it is that life ends and death begins (or vice versa) – even if we also understand that they are ineluctably other and not the same at all,” writes Marovich.

Sometimes questions have arisen such as: why can’t humans just be more nonchalant about death and loss? Could we, perhaps, accept the ubiquitous presence of death more easily in these lives of ours? Maybe we used to be more accepting back in the day when more babies died on the way and many, many more infants and children died before they turned ten.

I’ve also mused that maybe part of the reason loss is so painful and hard for us is because of our immense capacity as humans to feel love for ourselves, each other and this world. I don’t think we’re the only species with these capacities, by any means. But I have come to see how powerful and expansive the human heart can be – embedded as it is within the web of love that is our world (believe it or not). AND we just don’t know, eh? There is so much we don’t know. And this not-knowing offers all the more reason to be awe-struck by this experience called living (and dying) on Earth.

I am eternally grateful to my own sister-death sister, Krista Dragomer, for her artwork, inspiration, companionship and most of all, her love. Thanks, Krista, for gifting me this book and so much gratitude to Beatrice Marovich for offering me new ideas to chew on and digest. All of the artworks in this post are found in Sister Death and created by Krista Dragomer. Buy the book here.