Why Does Death Choose Us?

When we lose someone very close to us, we think, ‘Why did this happen to me and not someone else? Why did death choose us?’

The Mustard Seed is a beautiful story from Buddhism that helps us cope with this feeling. It goes something like this:

There was a young mother who lost her first baby to illness. Hysterical with grief she wandered the village desperately asking for medicine to bring him back to life. She was sent to Buddha who advised her to bring him back a few mustard seeds from a house that had not seen death. She knocked on the door of every house she could find, and while every house had mustard seeds, she could not find a single house where no-one had died. People had lost mothers, brothers, uncles, children, servants…Eventually she returned to Buddha with a new understanding: that our human life is impermanent, that we are all vulnerable to death at any time, and that the loss of a loved one is a universal human experience.

Death is very much less common in our contemporary Western culture, than it ever has been in the history of mankind. A few hundred years ago, war, famine and pandemic were normal. Children were not named until their christening, because many died first. Death was a part of everyday life, and the rituals that surrounded it were carried out by ordinary people.

After my partner Andy died, I was working on exhibitions about World War 1. I realized that my situation, of being a widow and solo mother struggling to work and raise children would have been commonplace then, and even more so in the influenza epidemic that followed.

We now expect that modern medicine will cure us of everything but very old age. We collectively pretend that death is never going to happen to us or our loved ones, and usually it doesn’t. The subject of death is taboo. No-one wants to talk about it, and when it happens few know what to say.

Nurses at Maori Hospital, Temuka, South Canterbury [1918] Christchurch City Libraries PhotoCD 15, IMG0033 The death rate of Māori in the 1918 epidemic was 42.3%. Hence the road blocks put in place in some rohe during the current Covid pandemic.

This makes us ill-prepared for death, and isolated in our grief. That is why I made the Art of Grief drawings, and why I am writing this blog: to open up this conversation, and to help those who are going through grief to know they don’t walk alone. It really helps if you can share your grief with with other grievers. My friends, family and community gave me a whole lot of loving and practical support. Without this I doubt I would have coped in the first few months. But it was sharing and discussing a lot of reading material with a friend who had lost his partner and a cousin who had lost his son, that helped me to process the grief over the next few years.

The current pandemic has returned us to a prescient awareness of death. What advice, from personal experience, would you give to someone facing grief or death? What books, talks, poems or websites would you recommend?