Before We Say Goodbye: Preparing for a Good Death. Ray Simpson
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restless activity, drug it with addictive substances, or isolate it by putting up defences. If we do this, our life becomes sound and fury, signifying nothing.
One philosopher describes this ache as ‘the existential loneliness’. This ache may become acute when someone close to us dies, or in the season of falling leaves and encroaching dark, or when we leave behind some familiar part of our lives, or when we find ourselves alone.
It may even throb when something triggers a sense of mystery – we fall in love, we give birth to a child, we observe a glory of creation, we witness a tragedy on our TV screen.
Perhaps we have a strong desire to hold on to some special feeling or experience, yet deep down we know that this is as futile as pretending that a snapshot can be the reality of every morning after.
Some never recognize the ache for what it is. The reason for this ache, in the words of one writer, is that ‘in the middle of life we are in death’. We want to achieve, to possess so much. A capacity for life seems at times without limit. Yet we know deep down that nothing will last. It will all fade away.
Our days are like grass.
We flourish like a flower of the field.
The wind passes over it and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more.
PSALM 103:15,16
That is the ache. The ache is there as a ‘prompt’. It prompts us to accept our mortality. Only when we accept that we shall lose it all will we be free to live fully, not as a right, but as a gift.
In 1997 John O’Donohue wrote a book entitled Anam Cara which became a bestseller. Anam cara is the Gaelic for ‘soul friend’. The soul friend of his book is not a person, it is death. O’Donohue writes:
Death is the great wound in the universe, the root of all fear and negativity. Friendship with our death would enable us to celebrate the eternity of the soul which death cannot touch… 1
Continually to transfigure the faces of your own death ensures that at the end of your life your physical death will be no stranger, robbing you against your will of the life that you have had. You will know its face intimately. Since you have overcome your fear, your death will be a meeting with a lifelong friend from the deepest side of your nature.
Death can be understood as the final horizon. Beyond there, the deepest well of your identity awaits you. In that well, you will behold the beauty and light of your eternal face.
Benjamin Franklin understood death in this way:
A man is not completely born until he is dead … We are spirits. That bodies should be lent us, while they afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring knowledge, or in doing good to our fellow creatures, is a kind and benevolent act of God. When they become unfit for these purposes, and afford us pain instead of pleasure, instead of an aid become an encumbrance, and answer none of the intentions for which they were given, it is equally kind and benevolent that a way is provided by which we may get rid of them. Death is that way. 2
A great nineteenth-century Russian spiritual director, Ivanov Macarios, wrote to a widow:
I thank you having revealed to me the sadness of your griefstricken heart; a great radiance comes over me when I share with others their sorrow. Complete, perfect, detailed compassion is the only answer I can give to your tender love of me that has led you, at such a time, to seek me out in my distant, humble hermitage.3
Claire Evans was dying, leaving behind a husband and an 11-year-old son. I recall her saying something like this to me: ‘I don’t know exactly what is coming next. But throughout my life I have listened to a voice deep inside me, and whenever I have followed this voice I have found that there is a response which makes me believe that the world is, at heart, a friend.’
Practise making a friend of death in every way you can, especially by listening to the voice deep inside you.
‘I don’t want to think about death,’ a 20-year-old friend told me. ‘I want to live all out and just go out in a twinkle.’
He thought he had no problem, but so do alcoholics who refuse help. They are in denial. A first step in the Alcoholics Anonymous rehabilitation programme is to recognize that there is a problem. It is like that with death.
Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer prize-winning book Denial of Death, asserts that the reality of our mortality constitutes the fundamental human terror, and our effort to come to terms with it ‘is a mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man’. In other words, if we don’t face this when we are young, we may spend the rest of our lives handcuffed to death rather than being truly free to be ourselves.
Another reason to start preparing for a good death when we are young is that we may die young. Millions of young people are killed through war, accident or illness each year.
WHY DO PEOPLE DIE YOUNG?
It is not a bad idea to start thinking about this: it begins to familiarize us with death. Here are some answers people give to this question:
• Good and evil happenings affect the whole human family, like the sun and the rain, without distinction.
• God wants a variety of people in heaven, so young as well as aged mortals need to enter it.
• In the words of a dying boy to his mother, ‘Don’t worry, Mum, my body’s only my reflection.’
A further reason for starting to prepare for death when we are young is that old habits die hard, but habits learned early come in handy later.
I met a couple who were dynamic leaders of a tough youth centre. They decided on a job change, and were shortly to become wardens of an old people’s home. I asked them why they were making such an unlikely change. ‘We have realized,’ they told me, ‘that in old age the negative habits that people display in youth come to the surface again. In the working years in between they have merely been covered up. We ourselves will be like those negative young people when we are aged, unless we work on it now. That is what we will now do.’
Good Pope John XXIII started to prepare for his death when he was a student. He used to play a kind of game, imagining that he was on his deathbed. Years later, he made a wonderful death which inspired the world.
You may, of course, be past youth or middle age. There is still hope. Research into the effects of smoking reveals that, although the highest health ratings go to those who gave up smoking from their youth, there is still a measurable improvement in health if lifelong smokers give up the habit as soon as they realize they have a life-threatening condition. It is like that with our preparations for our final goodbye.
Artists through the ages have tried to portray death. The artist Paul Klee died relatively young, and Death and Fire is one of his last works. A great dome of sun is held aloft by the skull of Death. Art critic Sister Wendy Becket comments:
The man who approaches is stripped to his essence: Is he humanity moving towards the grave? All this might seem sombre, yet the painting is aglow with the most life-affirming colour … Klee announces that death is a purifier, like