The real reason death has been showing up in all my work recently

“You’re fired” were the first words I remember hearing in the year 2022.

Jessica and I had spent 15 amazing, sometimes brutal, years in Iraq (where we still live) building a community around a peacemaking philosophy we called preemptive love. This life of preemptive love drove our community to the front lines of the war against ISIS, the Syrian civil war, and into the Taliban’s Afghanistan. But the extremism of American politics in the COVID era killed nuance. And we were unexpectedly fired without explanation.

People have since said things like, “I don’t know how you’ve handled this… I would die.”

And the truth is, I contemplated death a lot in the days and months that followed. Like, a lot.

I wondered how people survive loss without a bigger purpose than themselves. I thought about why people are driven to suicide. I parsed the differences between shame and humiliation. I marveled at the media’s insatiable lust for degradation ceremonies, stirring up our self-righteousness against one another to monetize our secret relief that we are not the ones being publicly destroyed… yet. And the importance of pathways for repair.

I also thought about the people I’d ghosted in their time of need because I either (a) didn’t want to say the wrong thing and “make it worse” or (b) didn’t want my own reputation to take a hit for cavorting with someone whose reputation had just taken a hit. And I wondered if they’d thought much about death when I’d gone silent on them, waiting for the smoke to clear.

So, those of you who took special note of last weeks’ macabre artwork, featuring a skull, weren’t wrong:

Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about death.

What kind of peacemaker makes light of death like this?

Well, me. I see Light everywhere. Even in death.

How is a naked skull supposed to help me on my own journey to peace? It’s gross!

If you’ll take this walk with me, I think I can show you.

Making Light of Death

Over the last 15 years, I’ve tiptoed the killing fields through the skulls and bones of genocide. I’ve stood over dead terrorists decaying in the streets. I’ve held babies and the mothers who lost them to the horrors of war. And I’ve carried the guilt of gathering a crowd targeted by snipers.

Yeah, I know a thing or two about death. In fact, the entire notion of preemptive love was nothing short of a call to give our lives away, even to death—an inversion of the “shoot first, ask questions later” War on Terror that was unleashed on the world after September 11th.

As militants on all sides made a “kill-em-all-let-God-sort-em-out” mess of the planet, we enjoyed the unexpected glow and warmth of relationships that burned brightly in the “love-em-all-let-God-sort-em-out” world we knew was possible.

If I could sum up my first 15 years of preemptive love as a humanitarian peacemaker, I might say it like this: making light of death.

The darkness I’ve seen is astounding. But so is the light that so often emerges from amidst whatever is being burned up and burned away.

I don’t know anything about photons or wave-particle duality, so I’m not going to force the metaphor any further. But I know this: those who’ve seen the worst are some of our best. Yes, pain and despair can snuff out a smoldering flame. But for those who don’t succumb or medicate it away, a habit develops—a making light of death and darkness.

Mocking or Transforming?

You might feel a little uncomfortable with the idea of “making light of death”, because it can mean death is no big deal, or it can mean transforming something we normally think of as dark into light itself.

I mostly mean the second. But as death loses its sting and we see it as the source of light it is, you might find your own deaths (plural) to be less of a big deal than you once thought.

Embracing Death(s)

The Roman emperors had servants accompany them on their victory processions, and while everyone was throwing praise and laurels in the streets, the servants would whisper in the emperor’s ear, “Remember, you’re gonna die.”

You’re a mortal.
You’re just like us.
This is fleeting.

One of those Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius, said, "All is ephemeral, both what remembers and what is remembered.”

Making light of death starts with embrace and ends in release.

This is the paradox I’ve learned over 15 years of death: when we embrace the ephemerality of all we have, we set ourselves free to enjoy everything and everyone more fully, because we’ve accepted that tomorrow it could be gone. Embrace of death, release of light.

We are mortal.
This is fleeting.
And we’re all gonna die.

Here’s the honest truth: I was ready to die at the hands of ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Iranian militia, Assad, etc because a death like that would have only increased the stock price of my family and the organization I founded. A death where you “live forever”.

But I was completely unprepared to die at the hands of Twitter.

Why? Well, for one, “Twitter is not a real place,” to quote the philosopher Dave Chapelle. I choose to live in Iraq, work in Syria, meet with warlords, etc. There is a massive amount of agency and freedom in choosing the general manner and meaning of your death, no matter how gruesome. Ask any soldier. For years I’ve said, “No one can take our lives, if we’re giving them away.” But the degree to which I’d really handed myself over to God or actually believed my life was not my own did not extend to that unreal place called Twitter. So when my real world reputation died in a ritual sacrifice to the angry gods of social media, I had to admit that I had not actually confronted all my deaths and the fleeting impermanence of all things the way I thought I had, let alone embraced it. Now, whatever part of me wanted to live forever in glory, gets to die forever on Google.

Memento Mori

And so it is that these memento mori, or “reminders of death”, that appear all over my work for the last year (the skeletons, skulls, flowers, candles, timepieces, etc) help me tap into Old Wisdom about how to live well. Take the old vanitas paintings, which feature decaying fruit, skulls, and candles to warn us against accumulation and the expectation of permanence. Or the Dance Macabre, where skeletons skate with kings, clergy, and commoners alike toward death in a lively dance, reminding us that status, wealth, and accomplishment are never really “growing”—they’re only passing away.

Some will turn everything around them to darkness just to make their light seem brighter. But dimming the lights of the world through constant skepticism and negativity is a dead end. Agents of Light spur each other on to love and good deeds and work to outdo one another in showing honor. This is the way of real peace.

New Light

So, in the end, I’ve become really grateful. Not for loss, deaths, or impermanence per se. But for a new catalyst for growth, a reason to reflect and dig deeper, and an increased capacity for making good out of the hard things of life. By embracing the shadow in me—my ego, my desire to live forever, my need for control—the Light in me is released to embrace others exactly as they are; released to grow; and, ultimately, transformed through some kind of born again, resurrected, life after deaths.

We are mortal.
This is fleeting.
And we’re all gonna die.

Here’s to making the most of it. I ask the Light to transform any darkness in me and shine anew.

Shine on!

Jeremy Courtney
@thejcourt