‘I do not want to die from some medical condition; I want to die from death.” Ivan Illich wrote that. What’s meant here? Don’t we all die from death? Of course, in reality that’s true. But in our idea of things, most often, we die from a medical condition or from bad luck through cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or as the victim of an accident. Sometimes we do die from a medical condition.
That’s what Ivan Illich is trying to highlight here. Death is meant to be met and respected as a normal human experience, not as a medical failure. Death and its inevitability in our lives are to be understood as a growth point, a necessary maturation, something to which we are organically and spiritually destined and not as an aberration or unnatural intrusion into the life cycle (an intrusion that could have been avoided except for an accident or failure of medicine). We need to understand death the way a woman carrying a child contemplates its delivery, not as some aberration or risky medical procedure but as the full flowering of a life process.
