WAIITING FOR DEATH

My sister Junko is in coma and on life support for two weeks. Her three sons are struggling to decide what advise they should give to the medical team. They are waiting for her eventual departure. Waiting is torturous. A German theologian Paul Tillich escaped the Nazi regime and spent most of his professional life in the U.S.A. He taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Harvard University, and University of Chicago. In his sermon titled “Waiting” Tillich defined faith as waiting. It is unsettling but engenders happiness and hope. It is like rendez-vous with the lover who promised to come.

One evening during the 1970’s, I was invited to attend the reading of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” by a friend. He was a member of the armature drama group. Performers were mostly civil servants employed by the United Nation’s organizations such as ILO and WHO based in Geneva, Switzerland. At the time, I was also employed by an international N.G.O. I heard the reading of “Waiting for Godot.” I didn’t understand what the drama was all about. Nevertheless I was mesmerized. Again and again I went to see it on stages and at movie houses in different cities. The questions raised by the “Godot” stayed with me.

I was not born Anglophone. Neither am I the type of person spending time reading and composing poems for pleasure. Nonetheless Godot has not left me alone like the tune of music playing non-stop in my head. I wonder “What does it mean to wait for an unknown?” Was Beckett dealing with death? Should I wait in fear? Or look forward to it? When you are dead, you feel or see nothing. For ancient Romans void was unthinkable. So there is no zero in Roman numerals. How can you deal with zero? Inability to recognize it does not mean it is non-existent. Albert Einstein and other theoretical physicists proposed ‘ether’ to fill the void. I learned that “zero” has its origin on the Indian Sub-continent. People there have always been spiritual.

When I wake up in the middle of the night with an inexplicable grief, it is often about those who left me as well as those I will leave behind. They are dead friends and relatives. Thinking of those I dearly love, my spouse, my child and grand children some of whom I will never see again. It’s worse than mere heart break. I understand why humans invented a delusion like after-life. I know it is a delusion but unconsciously we hope it is not. I perfectly understand why we invented such absurdity. In antiquated Hebrew language, Death and Hell are one same word. Many of us, however, imagine a life beyond death and sing “We will meet again” at funerals.

Faith is waiting, not 100 % sure but hope it’s worth. It’s like “Waiting for Godot.” Nobody knows who Godot is. But I know waiting is what we do. We wait anxiously with dread and hope. Japanese Samurai of old believed that the purpose of life was to discover good death. So we go on believing that whoever/whatever we are waiting for will come in due course.