holy dying, Batman

yes, I am the kind of person who watches sitcoms and ponders death

A couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t sleep, and I started watching “Grace and Frankie.”

Do you have shows you fall asleep to? Jack uses podcasts, and I’ve done that too, and sometimes I’ll read books on Libby. But some television shows are perfectly soporific, shows that are warm and funny and low-stakes and don’t have any sudden noises, just a chatter of conversation and instrumental background music. As long as the drama isn’t very real, my brain connects just enough to the show that my own thoughts can shut off, and then I can fall asleep. When I was a child, I always fell asleep listening to books on tape or audio dramas, and this habit feels like a reversion to that. Or maybe it’s deeper in human genetics, it’s someone telling a bedtime story until I drift off.

“Grace and Frankie” was a Netflix show that ended last year, after seven season. In the first episode, Grace (Jane Fonda) and and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) learn that their husbands (Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston) are gay, have been having an affair for many years, and are divorcing them to marry each other.¹ Grace and Frankie, who have known each other socially for years as frenemies, move in together until they figure out what to do.

Spoiler alert: they stay together, and become best friends.

The writing is very funny, and the principal actors are of course fantastic, even if much of the reality of grief and pain that might exist in such a scenario is tucked up and away like Jane Fonda’s wrinkles. I love a buddy comedy and an odd couple friendship and sass; of course I love that Grace and Frankie remind me of Mollie and Anna; of course I prefer all my media to be female-friendship-centric.²

But I think the real reason I want to keep watching is that I’ve never seen the questions raised by aging in American culture dramatized.³ And even in their airbrushed and comedic condition, they’re real. When your whole life has been about growth and success and building and meaningful work, what happens when it’s time to downsize or retire? When your sense of self has developed around one set of things, what happens if they’re stripped away? When you’ve lived most of your adult life in hiding, what happens when you stop? When independence and autonomy and not being a burden to others have been your key values, what will you do when you need help, and needing help makes you feel like a moral failure?

In divinity school, I was assigned 17th century Anglican thinker Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying. (I say I was assigned them because I did not exactly read them very thoroughly.) In honor of Taylor’s feast day last month, Lauren Winner, vicar at St. Joe’s, wrote to the church about him:  

Taylor wrote Holy Living first, and, as the title suggests, it includes some elemental instructions about how to craft a life of holiness. Taylor commends regular Scripture reading and prayer; he urges people to take “care of our time,” not dissipating it in idleness or regret; he is interested in how we treat our bodies — in whether we do right by our neighbors — in how we “entercourse with God." Holy Dying is more focused: it is an instruction in how to die well. 

There are many reasons, I think, Taylor became so dear to me so quickly — among other things, his prose is a pleasure to read. It occurs to me only now that another reason Taylor may have so struck me is that my mother was dying when Professor Sedgwick introduced me to Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, and the latter articulated something I was seeing in my own home: we die as we lived; a person’s death will manifest those particular habits and virtues and casts of mind the person practiced and honed throughout her life. If you are generous in life, you will be generous in death; if you were, in life, attentive to quiet but important things, you’ll be attentive to such things as you die; if you were anxious or grasping in life, you’ll be anxious or grasping in death. In this way, Taylor’s two books complement one another — the practices of a holy life are exactly what make possible a holy death.

Very little in my life invites me to contemplate my death. I am busy, consumed by things that feel utterly essential now, my reputation, my sphere of influence, Sunday’s sermon, when I will eat tater tots next. “Grace and Frankie” serves as a memento mori — or, perhaps not a reminder of my death, but a reminder that my body will fail, and my mind will fail, and someday I will not be able to construct or sermon, and I’ll have to eat mashed potatoes instead of tater tots.

Next month at my church, I’m hosting a weekly dinner series called Holy Dying (it may be available to stream — I’m not sure yet — though even if it is, it’s preferable to think about death while we’re in a room full of other bodies, not alone in our beds). On Sunday mornings, our adult formation class will look at Christian perspectives on heaven, hell and the afterlife; on Wednesday evenings, we’ll gather over dinner to hear from various speakers:

• Our rector, the Rev. Dr. Scott White, will talk about the theology in the rite for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer

• The Rev. Dr Lauren Winner will talk about the Biblical image of God as a gravedigger (I asked her to remind me exactly where that image shows up, and she said I would have to wait and see)

• Dr. Christiana Peterson will talk about the practice of memento mori, and how the spiritual practices of facing death help us know how to live (she’s got a book on this, as well as a podcast premiering soon!)

• Dr. Mallory McDuff will talk about the possibility of caring for creation and our descendants with green burial (her book on the topic is great)

We’ll wrap up the series with a glorious All Saints dinner on November 1, when we’ll light candles and process into the memorial garden, and read the names of all those interred there.

I organized this series for my parishioners, but also for myself, because I need something to help me pause my achieving and accumulating and think about who I’ll be when those things end; how I can live now with that end in mind.

Jeremy Taylor is likely right that as we live, so we will die. And yet I hope there’s a little grace for us at the end, as there is for Grace and Frankie. Grace is a mean alcoholic who doesn’t know her grandkids’ names. Frankie is an aging hippie, irritatingly out-of-touch with the way the world works, and too often high. Their ex-husbands, after decades of infidelity and selfishness, don’t know how to be in healthy relationship. But the writers give them all more grace than they deserve. They give each other more grace than they deserve. I hope we do that, too, in living, and in dying.

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Three things:

• I think it’s been at least a decade since I ate at Taco Bell, but last week I found myself thinking about the Mexican Pizza. This copycat recipe was just right.

• A couple of young lady priests have started a podcast on “reclaiming ancient faith in modern Christian life” and I am grateful it exists.

• I made you a little booklist.

• Bonus: if you, like me, already dress like you’re 78 half the time, this dress is on sale and I would like to live in it. (And believe it or not Rosie told me that when I wore it with a collar, it “slayed.”)

Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold. My first book, Dangerous Territory, has a second edition coming this November; you can pre-order it now at Bracket Publishing.

1. At least, I think this happens in the first episode. I slept through a lot of the first season.

2. See also boygenius and Steel Magnolias and Betsy-Tacy

3. contemporary middle-class white Californian culture, specifically; insert here the caveats about class and ethnicity, etc