Discussing death in a secular age
HOW DO WE MAKE SENSE OF THE SENSELESS?
Terrorism blows up beliefs alongside bodies. Our whole liberal system of thought is centred around the idea that societies can be improved — perfected, even — through education and science. But events such as the Manchester Arena bombing remind us that in critical ways, nothing has changed since the era of Viking raids, and that when we promise our children we will keep them safe, we are speaking in white lies.
Two months ago, I took my 11-year-old girl to her first concert (a 14-year-old YouTube star named Johnny Orlando). On Monday, after hearing the news from England, she told me: “I don’t want to go to concerts anymore.” No doubt, she will eventually change her mind. But in the moment, it was heartbreaking.
This discussion was not the first of its kind. On Christmas Eve last year, a boy at my daughter’s school was killed, along with his parents and brother, when a fire destroyed their cottage on Stoney Lake, northeast of Toronto. The news came in on her social media after she’d opened her gifts.
And I realized that I hadn’t the slightest idea how to talk to my children — or anyone — about death.
Not so long ago, public grieving for the victims of a bombing or fire would be tempered by the consolations of heaven, where the souls of the departed would one day be joined by those of loved ones. Even if many Christians did not privately believe in the afterlife, the publicly expressed idea that part of us would survive death made the process of mourning more bearable.
At the very least, it gave us something hopeful to say to one another after we’d exchanged grave looks and shaken hands.
We have preserved a few pale echoes of this religiosity — such as in editorial cartoons that mark the passing of famous politicians and athletes by showing them making jokes with Saint Peter. But otherwise, God is now excluded from public grieving.
HOW DO YOU WIN A WAR AGAINST SAD SOULS WHO IMAGINE MURDER AS AN EASY AND GLORIOUS WAY TO REDEEM A FAILING LIFE? — JONATHAN KAY
Even as early as 1999, Christian clergy who spoke at a memorial service for the 229 victims of a Swissair Flight that crashed off the Nova Scotia coast were instructed by federal protocol officials not to mention Jesus or the Bible in their remarks, lest the audience become uncomfortable.
This summer will mark 20 years since the death of Princess Diana. An estimated 2.5-billion people saw her funeral on television. Millions more watched her cortege in person, or left flowers at Kensington Palace and her family’s estate, in head-high piles so massive that the bottom layers began to compost before they were removed with bulldozers. British cultural critics disparaged the gaudy sentimentality. But the accumulation of roses and teddy bears at least presented Britons with some form of visual evidence that they were not grieving alone — that there was a social aspect to the tragedy.
Others latched on to conspiracy theories about Diana’s death, which provide another kind of comfort — because anger is a more psychologically manageable emotion than grief. Following the same psychological pattern, a certain portion of the population always will demand that we avenge the victims of terrorism — and thereby bring meaning to their deaths — by indiscriminately bombing (or even invading) foreign countries. It feels good to imagine that evil has a specific address, like the villain in a James Bond film, where it can be fought and defeated.
Salman Abedi, the Islamist terrorist who detonated himself outside of Monday’s Ariana Grande concert, killed 22 people. The youngest of his victims was Saffie Rose Roussos, age eight. I imagine hundreds of neighbourhood parents having the same morbid, awkward conversations with their children that I had on Christmas. The stories that eight-year-olds are used to hearing all come with happy endings — or, at least, endings that offer a useful lesson for self- improvement. But in a largely godless world, it is almost impossible to disguise the fact — even from a child — that the death of an eight-year-old represents nothing beyond a hideous and senseless human trauma from which her family will never recover.
But we try. Friends and relatives of the family that perished on Stoney Lake set up a foundation to improve the park and rink in their Toronto neighbourhood of Riverdale — a modest initiative, but one that will benefit the community in tangible ways, and keep their memory alive for decades among their erstwhile neighbours. On Wednesday, the teachers at Saffie’s school in England held a special assembly, at which students shed tears, observed a moment of silence, and sang the Journey anthem Don’t Stop Believing. The school principal urged everyone “to hold on to the love among us.” The memorial Facebook pages for other Manchester Arena victims also reflect this vague, but admirably humane idea that we should respond to tragedy by loving one another more. It is sentimental and unsatisfying. But without God by our side, it’s the best we can do.
We understand terrorist groups such as ISIL through the prism of religion and geopolitics, because this is what they tell us is their inspiration. But for homegrown suicide bombers such as Abedi, it is also useful to consider self-immolation as a pathological response to their own mortality. Deriving meaning from our lives requires that we invest time and effort in forging social connections, being faithful to friends and families, performing the exhausting emotional work required “to hold on to the love among us,” raising children, bringing them out to the rink every week. Radically nihilistic ideologies such as militant Islam supply an alternative path — by allowing even the most alienated and unsuccessful human specimen to imbue his existence with meaning, and cast his death as a scene of glory, with one flick of a switch.
It’s a completely sick and inhuman narrative, but I can see why it has appeal to brainwashed sociopaths who view other human beings as extras in the horror film of their own life. Abedi reportedly was an aimless dropout and loafer. In this respect, he was hardly atypical: Many homegrown Islamist terrorists are petty criminals and dead enders who have spent their young lives bouncing around courtrooms, jails, and gang life.
Politicians talk about winning the war on terrorism. But how do you win a war against sad souls who imagine murder as an easy and glorious way to redeem a failing life? With Mosul about to completely fall to Iraqi forces this summer, ISIS may soon be extinguished as a force in the world. But there will always be something like ISIS to lure violent young men. We live in a world of 7-billion people. And it only takes a small handful to blow up the pretense that mothers and fathers can ever truly guarantee the safety of their children — or even bring them to a concert without casting nervous, protective eyes to every corner of the room.