Just once in your lifetime – Napoleon Ato Kittoe writes

The death knell will sound in your own ears just once. Afterwards, you won’t hear it again, everlastingly. If you heard it, you are leaving the shared stage, and those who remain shudder and wonder where they will be heading one day. Fate is a future certainty, but unavoidable, above all is death — the stamp on the end of your life’s journey. As the saying goes, “Death is the only certainty of life. Everything else is a probability.” Japanese writer Haruki Murakami made life and death look seamless by conjoining both: “Death is not the end of life. It is part of it.” That gives balm to those who see death as a harrowing experience.

English poet John Donne did not treat death like an ending. He argued that death is not powerful, and we should not fear it. His case is made in “Holy Sonnet 10: Death Be Not Proud”, 1609. I studied him in our sixth form literature anthology at Osei Kyeretwie Secondary School in Kumasi, Ghana. He opens: “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” Donne says death only seems powerful because people think it ends everything, but it does not. To him, death equals sleep plus rest — not destruction. If we enjoy sleep, death should be even more pleasurable because it is eternal rest for believers.

Donne goes further: “Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men.” He calls death a servant. It acts only when fate, sickness, war, or suicide commands it. It has no free will. His boldest claim is that death itself dies in the end. Grounded in Christian faith, he looks forward to resurrection over what men call finality. For minds cloaked in divine wisdom, physical death is temporary.

Since Donne rooted relief in faith, we turn to scripture. Ecclesiastes 7:2-3 says, “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart. Frustration is better than laughter, because a sad face makes the heart wise.” King Solomon was not telling us to be sad always. Funerals teach us more than parties do. Parties distract. Mourning forces us to think about life, purpose, and what actually matters.

Death is a reality we see at every funeral. Ghanaian highlife musician Amakye Dede sang that it is at someone’s funeral that we mourn ourselves, as the dead fall into unconsciousness or permanent separation from the physical world. It brings out the paradox in the Nigerian film “Dead Men Walking” and makes it more inviting. I remember sitting as a child on the bare floor when Head of State, Gen. Fred Akuffo reviewed Police Cadet Course 17 at the Police Training School, Tesano, Accra. Forty years on, none of those cadets remain. We infants then are now in their age bracket, and we see life trapped in that cycle.

My father used to tell me which of his colleagues had died whenever I returned home on school vacation. On January 26, 2013, he also parted company with us. At the burial service, Reverend Okoto at Kpong Bethel Presby Church said, “Dada won’t be seen again, in the physical form we used to see him.”

In 1947, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas made the opposite pronouncement: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” He wrote it pleading with his dying father. Thomas saw death as the total end of man — the opposite of Donne. Both views matter because they represent society’s major perceptions of death. Thomas died in 1953, the year after his father died.

American novelist Jodi Picoult wrote, “We are all dying. Some of us know it sooner.” From that truth we face the deaths of some mighty people. Dr Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Nelson Mandela of South Africa, King Hassan II of Morocco, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Sam Nujoma of Namibia, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Even dictators like Field Marshal Idi Amin of Uganda, General Sani Abacha of Nigeria, and Germany’s Adolf Hitler — all succumbed. Steve Jobs, Apple’s visionary, faced a terminal illness and said, “Nobody can escape it.” Today, people dismiss talk of death because money and the future matter more. Yet poets, writers, historians, and sages keep pulling us back to the dead.

Lois McMaster Bujold reminds us: “The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.” How many of us make time for that duty? The longest continuous protest for victims of war and nuclear death was held by Concepción “Connie” Picciotto — 34 years, 177 days outside the White House, starting June 3, 1981. Countries hold memorial days, but the core reason must be justice. The Akan say: “A person with good name does not die.” Ghana’s former President Jerry John Rawlings eulogized Hon. Kwadwo Baah Wiredu, a finance minister from the opposing party who died in 2008. Comments converged he was a good man. Those who love never truly leave us. Some things death cannot touch include the principles we lived for.

I will end here with Mark Twain: “The fear of death follows from the fear of life.” Marcus Aurelius said, “It is not death that a man should fear. Rather he should fear not beginning to live.” The clearest explanation to their statements came from Kobe Bryant: “I don’t fear death. I fear the day I stop trying.”