... one could see a death day as auspicious, a good thing, a celebration, a day that carries meaningful outcomes long into the future.
This fresh reflection comes straight from the gem of a human who completes my taxes. (You have to have five graduate degrees to be able to decipher clergy taxes, so I outsource it with relief, gratitude and a thimbleful of shame that I can’t do them myself.) She was asking about what Dying Well, LLC does, believing it to be a public speaking business. After telling her I was death doula, she said she had heard of that and that her own father’s death was an opportunity for “joy” in her family—as in the Biblical “count it all joy” sense (James 1:2-4). I volleyed back, “Indeed. On my website I write that the dying time is the time of living where you get the chance to live abundantly in a way unlike any other time of life.”
Then she launched into a little vignette demonstrating that very idea. She told me that her father had had a massive heart attack, never regained consciousness and died on Christmas Day. She told me that most people would think of dying on Christmas Day as a sad, depressing thing, always to be dreaded when it comes around year after year. For her, she said, “I think that of all the days one might die, Christmas Day, if you’re a Christian, which he was, is the best day to die on. You die on Jesus’s birthday, and you're his gift.”
What a perfectly Christian thing to say, contained within the theology of that tradition. This statement captures the spiritual imagination of those who believe not only in a life that follows this one, but one in which they are reunited with their deity. And as an offering to boot! "And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee," as we say in the old words of the Episcopal Church.
What drew me to this reflection was not the theological statement so much as the notion that a death day can be auspicious, something to look forward to, something to celebrate year in, year out. We hear from Hindus and shamanic traditions that there are certain auspicious days on which to be married or to be born. While understated, the notion of auspicious birthdays is even present in our American culture, namely around solstices and equinoxes. "She was born on the first day of spring," say.
Auspicious, generally speaking, is about luck or blessing, specifically focused on results. An auspicious day is a day that speaks well or points positively toward the continual deliverance of good. The word omen embodies this meaning, though we typically associate omen with something bad. Thanks a lot, Richard Donner. To choose an auspicious day on which to wed in the Hindu traditions means that you look to the alignment of planets, constellations and the moon in order to set up your marriage for meaningful outcomes and successful results, such as health, wealth, and children.
An etymological inquiry into auspicious reveals it to be a compound word. In Latin, it’s a combination of “awi,” meaning bird and “spek,” meaning to observe. It comes from a 16th century Latin word—“auspex,” which was someone who interprets omens given by birds.
This is an interesting wondering. Looking into the root of the word awi, you can see avian, aviary quite easily. But where does awi comes from? From the Sanskrit vih. (Back to the subcontinent!) And, as you might expect from a root that deals with birds, vih has to do with sky and spirit. It can also mean to leave, to cease and heaven. Without going too deeply into the etymological dream of the word auspicious, we might reflect that for something to be a positive sign of something good in the future, auspicious carries within its etymological structure a word which points toward leaving, specifically leaving skyward, as a specifically positive thing. The Sanskrit root vih provides us with some other telltale English words that hint at an association with death: to abandon, to forsake, to give up, to cease.
Birds and abandonment. Skyward spirits flying, forsaking this life, embracing the next. Ascending. While I myself don’t like the heaven=good/earth=bad dichotomy that plagues Christianized western culture, auspiscious certainly conveys that sense. However, I don’t think the dichotomy necessarily needs to be present.
The point here is that if one chooses, one could see a death day as auspicious, a good thing, a celebration and a victory day, a beneficial day that carries meaningful outcomes long into the future.
I remember a friend from high school telling me about the “death day party” they were having for his father who had died early in life. I had never heard of such a thing. So infected with the death phobia of my culture was I at the time that I felt he was being a little morbid. I told my mother about this conversation, and she explained to me that indeed remembering the day someone died was a way of recalling your love for them and paying special attention to their memory. I immediately softened to the idea and regarded that friend in a very different way whenever I encountered him. Here was a fellow teenager whose father had died when my friend was a child. I could not understand that, but I could imagine, and my heart opened to imagining what my friend’s family life might be like without his father. My friend’s sharing about his father’s death day party cultivated in me compassion, open-mindedness, and an appreciation of my own father still being alive.
Perhaps in families all around this land, death days are viewed with the kind of auspiciousness that my CPA welcomes or that my high school friend observed. The way she spoke of it was a new idea to me, however, and reminded me of the conversation with my high school friend. When I think about my father’s death day, I think about Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it was a celebration of family. In my memory, Thanksgiving was a day of fun, cooking together, eating amazing Southern food, enjoying those tryptophan-induced naps, shuffling Rook games late into the night, and being outside in the morning before the meal preparations picked up speed.
My father died on November 30. My mother had made him a full Thanksgiving dinner and took it to the rehab center he was in after a tough season with the degenerative illness he suffered from. He enjoyed that meal immensely, I hear tell. With that loving memory and the weight of all the family celebrations at Thanksgiving, November 30 is a tough day for my mom, understandably.
Given this reflection about death days being auspicious things, however, I will walk with her through that day this November with a softer sense of celebration rather than stepping too carefully throughout the days before and after. I might ask her to recall Thanksgiving stories with Dad. Perhaps there were special meals she can remember, like the orange duck she made one year at Dad’s request. What were their first Thanksgivings like, before us kids came along? I may just ask her to play back her favorite memories of Thanksgiving with us, and what kinds of things Dad did specifically.
We don’t have to throw a party on November 30, but making it into a day of celebratory remembrance is a nod in the direction of considering my father’s death day as auspicious. Once upon my ancestral past in the British Isles, death days were marked and celebrated, using the stars and planets as guides. The return of the auspicious can help us mark our days with gratitude for living and equip us with a sense of joyful anticipation instead of dread for the day of our death or the death of one we love.
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