Death, My Mentor 

Death is my mentor, guide, and companion. Sudden death. Wrongful death. Accidental death. Threatening death. These are the spiritual mentors which have guided my life, my relations, my quiet moments, and my committed actions. 

Some people believe I have had more sudden death in my life than most. There is no way to affirm that, but I am certain that Death’s presence, and the deaths which haunted my WWII- generation parents, set the lens through which every moment in my life makes sense. 

And I’m not a glum person. 

At twenty-one, already chiseled by Death’s sudden glance, I was given The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker.  For the first time in my life, another’s view of the world matched my own. I had struggled for fifteen years to make sense of a world where nothing is secure, anything can be taken away, and no one can talk about it. I focused on Becker’s intuition that the denial of death was behind most mental illness and social ills. Pursuing a career in social work, I longed to help people face their unconscious fears and hold strong in facing those fears’ concrete realities. Plumbing my own Death-shaped wounds would certainly be the way to begin.  

I wrote my master’s thesis, Existential Awareness: One Vehicle for Empathy with the Schizophrenic, at age twenty-four. Severe mental illness and its intransigent bondage to denied realities may well be loosed by Death’s compassion as nursemaid and healer.  Thank you, Dorcas Bowles, DSW, for encouraging me to explore this question. Yet Death wasn’t done with me. As a secular child of the sixties, that thesis was just a beginning. I would like to say that decades of psychotherapy, professional training, motherhood, financial success, and more sudden losses made me a skilled Death traveler. But no, they just eased the path, providing exit ramps on a steep decline.  

Myth was a sturdier vehicle. Brunnhilde, Nordic death warrior, was broken by love, humanness, and mortality. Numb to death until awakened to her Father-God’s rapacious cruelty—Death to love, Love to Death—she redeems the World, setting it on fire. Thank you, Jean Shinoda-Bolen, Jungian analyst and author of The Ring of Fire, for revealing this mythic sister in my heart. When I long for a deeper connection to life’s ironies and Death’s galloping flames, the last twenty minutes of Götterdämmerung always do the trick!  

And Holy Saturday. Thank you, Fr. Richard Rohr. Before Falling Upward, which turned my life upside down at the age of sixty, I could only see Christianity as a torture cult. In my first season (2013) of reading the Daily Meditations, Fr. Richard walked straight through that crucifix crucible, standing in Holy Saturday where there is no hope, only Death. Death, again the mentor, the still and patient Teacher—holding everything; waiting without relief, only trauma, grief, and hopelessness—stands strong in the sealed Cave. In the words of Leonard Cohen, “You want it darker? We kill the flame.”¹ In the current world, standing still and waiting with Death the Mentor gives me hope. 

Kristina Flanagan, MSW, is a sendee of the 2023 Living School and current CAC student in the Essentials of Engaged Contemplation course. Mother of two grown daughters and precious “Oma” to three grandchildren, her life balances reflection time, horsemanship, wounded healing, and joy. Her favorite saying is, “If you’re not laughing, you’re not paying attention.”