thoughts percolating

[rm]

But, instead of telling you them, I have a poll.

What's your relationship to death/Death (capitalization as you prefer)?
Please share any thoughts you have about gender as connected with that.

Thnx.

Comments

[askeladden.livejournal.com]

My own relationship to death is disappointingly unleavened by archetype. I don't really fear it. I'd like to put it off if I can, and I'm a bit curious about what it'll entail when it happens, but it's not much of a looming figure in my life.

My most persistently recurring nightmare (since childhood) is of surviving a horrible disease which then kills the person (sometimes my mother, sometimes my lover) who nursed me through it, for whatever that's worth.

The first thing that came to mind respecting death and gender was Schubert's song Death and the Maiden, but I don't know that I have much to say about it offhand. I'll post the text and let it percolate a bit in my head, and if I get anything out of it, I'll comment again. Also, if you want an mp3, I can mail it to you. It's a wonderful song. The string quartet based on it is mindblowing too.

Franz SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
Text: Matthias Claudius

Das Mädchen:
"Vorüber! ach, vorüber!
Geh, wilder Knochenmann!
Ich bin noch jung, geh, Lieber!
Und rühr mich nicht an!!

Der Tod:
"Gib deine hand, du schön und zart Gebild,
Bin freund und komme nicht zu strafen.
Sei guten Mutes! Ich bin nicht wild,
Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen!"

English Translation by Emily Ezust

The Maiden:
"Go past me, oh, go past!
Go, savage man of bone!
I am still young; go please
and do not molest me."

Death:
"Give me your hand, your fair and tender form!
I am a friend; I do not come to punish.
Be of good cheer! I am not savage.
You shall sleep gently in my arms."

[askeladden.livejournal.com]

I should mention that I've never seen death close up. I've had cats who died, and a client, once, and some relativese I never really got to know, but no one whom I've both loved and spoken with.

[crazycatlady.livejournal.com]

My thoughts on death are that it's a perfectly natural part of life. Banal and straight out of a psychology book. My feelings on death, however, are that it's not something I particularly spend a lot of time thinking about, but sometimes it just strikes me that in a few measly little decades I'm going to be nothing more than a series of memories and a box in the ground. It's sad, I won't deny that. What really gets me is thinking about my loved ones' mortality. I've had friends and family die on me in the past and to be honest, it's sucked. When I was 13 my best friend died. The first thing I wanted to do when I got home from school the day it happened was call her and tell her everything that'd happened, and the minute I realized I couldn't do that, that I could never do that again, was rough. Really rough. At the same time though, it was comforting that she wouldn't know exactly how she died or what happened to her body afterwards. She, in my opinion, deserved better than that.

So...in a roundabout answer, my relationship with death is one of acknowledgement. We try to stay away from each other, but every once in awhile death feels compelled to remind me it's still there.

[orobouros.livejournal.com]

not particularly afraid of it. I've made peace with it long ago.

That said, when it comes, I'd prefer it either come quietly in my sleep. I have no desire to be the next Schiavo case.

hmm.

[radiantfracture]

How very well-adjusted everyone appears to be. I think I will comment just for variety.

I've had a horror of death since I was a small child. It recurs periodically, often when I'm under stress, as a kind of phobic attack. Food goes tasteless in my mouth, etc. I call these the Death Threats.

I use various strategies to deal with this feeling -- to distract, to rationalize, to focus on the present moment. It isn't that I haven't thought about how death is natural, logical, a gift, ad infinitum, wa ha, it's just that in the moment of contemplating the blankness of nonexistence, the annihilation of the self, these things are often insufficient balm. Or they quiet the crisis of the moment, but they don't prevent it from recurring.

No doubt I simply have more fear chemicals than most people, and it is more about Phobia and less about Thanatos. The level of crisis has sometimes dragged me through to insights I might not have experienced otherwise, so I'm grateful for that.

I've noticed as I've gotten older that sometimes when I'm very tired, after a long and uninspiring day, death seems like kind of a nice break.

On the smaller scale, I am afraid of dying before I've written enough. Also afraid of running out of things to write before I die.

Gender, though. This death thing seems to be a private battle of mine, girl and man. In that testosterone does alter my relationship to my emotions -- it makes them less immediate and trickier to decipher -- it may help to reduce the frequency of the death threats. It hasn't changed my relationship to the idea of my dying, which is: I'm against it.

I am interested, though, in what your hypothesis might be.

{rf}

[00goddess.livejournal.com]

I've said it before and I say it again: death (non-capitalized, non-personified) is a thief that steals from the living. My friends who are dead- all the times we could have shared are stolen from both of us.

[monkeycurious.livejournal.com]

I have lost a number of people close to me, about 4 family members to disease, (heart attacks and cancer), and several other kids I grew up with, all 3 to suicide.

I was going to say I have no gender association with death or Death the entity, but, all of those people were male.

Men live shorter lives statistically. That could be due to higher rates of suicide or car accidents or dangerous jobs that traditionally don't allow women, and you can believe that is because they are sexist or that they believe women should be protected from danger, which could still be inherintly sexist, but it is still an extant cultural belief.

When a women dies in, especially any other way than naturally, I think we are more shocked, more appalled that if it was a man. Less shocked than if it was a child or a puppy, of course.

I don't think Death would be male or female, because I believe they are one thing outside of our cultural bullshit, but I think we believe It prefers men.

[ladyofthelog.livejournal.com]

Hmm. The only person close to me who has died was my maternal grandmother. She died peacefully at the end of a long illness. I have never really been afraid of death; I'm fairly comfortable with death itself. I grieved greatly for my grandmother, but that was mostly for my loss: the fact that her death meant an end to her suffering was a comfort.

As far as Death, it's hard to say. I don't really personify death - I think of it as kind of an all-consuming empty blackness. However, I rather like Terry Pratchett's Death.

[mobobocita.livejournal.com]

Death hasn't ever been personal to me, it's not that I don't know people who have passed or even that people close to me haven't passed, I just don't process it like most do, to me? Life is transient, people come, people go and death? Is just a going for a long time. I've never really fully processed the whole "I won't see them again" or they are really gone ideas, people live on in my memory, if I want a conversation, I just recall one.

So I suppose I don't react properly either.

[dacuteturtle.livejournal.com]

Death just happens. People die. Either it's a shame, and I forget them right away, or I'm glad that they are dead because I never liked them anyway. Harsh, but true.

The part about death that effects me is the mood of others. This upsets me. I am glad when they are done being upset. I get antsy waiting for them to be done.

I don't know why I am so cold to death. I think that my tendency to live on my own means that I accept when others go away. For me, they were never really HERE; they were illusions of people here. When they go away, my proof of illusion is realized.

When my grandfather died, that was a relief. He had alzheimer's, so death for him was a blessing. It was a big burden off my mother. I can't say that I was fond of him. I did not hate him, but he was not a warm man.

My most recent revelation on death occurred while getting operated on. I went under, then came up. That non-existed nothingness that existed in that non-moment between me being aware and unaware. That's death. I'll be dead and I won't even know that I am dead because I am not aware that I am not aware. The illusion will be gone and I will not know.

Thinking that I will die spurs me onto productivity. I don't seek to avoid death. Death makes me pursure a life worth living. Death itself tends to be out-of-mind.

[miep.livejournal.com]

I fear death, because I am so desperately in love with living. I ahve dreams where I die, and at the moment of death, I wake up. I am exploring the belief that death is birth into the world of the spirit, but it's not my belief yet. There's a lot of stuff about reincarnation that i'm trying to wrap my head around, too, but it's not quite there.

mostly, I'd like death not to come for me or those I cherish. I've never been ill unto death, nor have I sustained grievous injury. I fear not to awaken, and I fear dying and discovering I was wrong about life.

[miep.livejournal.com]

also, with regard to gender, I guess I don't think about death and relationship to gender. I don't think about gender much, except to notice how excesively girly I am and how I make assumptions about the children based on biology. but wuth regard to death? not so much.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I'm so damned scared. I have panic attacks some times at night just even contemplating the possibility of it, just thinking everyone dies eventually. I want to know more than anything what happens to me, where I go when this flesh fails. It is the root of every goddamned problem I have. It would be okay if I just knew, but I can't, and it makes me insane. Just typing this comment makes me want to scream or hurt myself to make certain I'm still here.

[graene.livejournal.com]

It's odd, my relationship with death fell apart somewhere along the line, about when I realized I was no longer convinced I would die at/about 36 years of age. Now I have a curiousity about death in other species that seems..offputting to others. I mean, I have to hide my hope of seeing something ...meaningful? at least to me, when helping euthanize animals. After the moment of death, my focus on service, helping the survivors tends to snap back, which is why I haven't started avoiding those work situations.

Beyond that I just ignore it really. It'll happen, I'm not hiding, it's part of the life cycle, but it's just not relevant to me right now so ...it's like a gap in my thoughts when it comes up.

[intenselee.livejournal.com]

Just passing through...

I wrote an entry about my thoughts on, and relationship to Death. If You feel like reading, here it is. It's long and full of my own weird way of writing like I talk, but...*shrug*

http://intenselee.livejournal.com/2001/01/11/

I've written about the death of several friends in my journal and expounded on Death. They are all quite...different from each other in tone and content. Here is one.

http://intenselee.livejournal.com/28407.html?mode=reply


Have a pleasant weekend..*smile*

[jothanbar.livejournal.com]

I've had quite a lot of people in my life die. A grandfather and grandmother and an uncle, when I was too young to know. The other grandfather and grandmother, when I did know. My father. A great aunt and a great uncle. A friend at university killed himself, though I didn't find out until long after the fact. I'm inured to it, in some ways, though I get struck by massive grief pangs at random times.

I don't fear my own death. At all. I'm terrified of aging, of dementia, of blindness, of all the things that precede death, but death itself - because I've got no belief in the afterlife, I can't fear it because once it's happened I won't be aware of it. I dwell on the potential death of people I know quite a lot - I have weird mental tangents where I think what might happen to them and almost plan it out.

Nothing really gender-specific to comment.

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

I have no gender associations with death. I have very little theoretical grounding in death, either; it's something that happens to everyone at one point or another, fairly or not. The dying is harder for me than the death. I say that having lost my grandmother at 91, my friend Dave at 38, my alcoholic aunt at 52, and my mother's best friend at 44 (who had a son with MS who died at 19 a few years later). My family is riddled with cancer and I assume that my own body may turn on me someday.

I am more afraid of not making peace with reality than I am of dying. Having said that, I am sometimes pinioned by a sense of time running out, and it swallows my ability to create the life I want. I am more convinced though that this has to do with my upbringing than with death.

Only when I turned 30 did I realize I never expected to live that long. I can't rationally explain why I felt that way, but it's most of why the current state of my life happened so quickly and critically.

I have also many times been the bearer of things people don't wish to acknowledge, and that has put me in a peculiar place when people are going through their own stuff. I don't deny them as they have me. Sometimes I think my capacity to hold others' pain keeps me on a certain threshold. That sounds like romanticism perhaps, and it happens more with acquaintances than with close friends. But I have just assumed it to be part of my interaction with the world at large.

There is also a migraine/death continuum but I need to think about that.