Category: Death Meditation

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Deborah DiSesa Hirsch: Passing of Baby Boomers has sobering subtext

Patty Duke

A lot of Baby Boomers have died recently. Garry Shandling. David Bowie. Glenn Frey. And now, Patty Duke.

I was connected to her in a very personal way. When we were preteens, my best friend (also my cousin), and I used to sit in front of the TV in our sponge curlers and Lanz nightgowns, fantasizing about what it would be like to be Patty, always getting into trouble (but having fun) in high school. We loved, too, Cathy, her identical perfectly behaved but boring cousin from Scotland (with that adorable accent). I was always Cathy.

This is what high school would be like, falling in love with our French teachers, switching places to fool teachers, Cathy getting a flu shot when they thought she was Patty. And that flip haircut! Kind of like us.

Then came the drugs and divorces, and bipolar disorder, and no more sweet Patty Lane. The fairy tale ended. For a long time, her life was in decline. Just like a lot of us.

Something broke inside when I heard of her death. I’ve had friends die — one, at 37 — but it’s getting closer and closer.

My husband has started collecting Social Security and now, Medicare.

You know somewhere, in the back of your head, that you will die someday. I, more than most, was exposed to it early, diagnosed twice with cancer.

I suppose it’s all coming home to me because my husband is facing surgery. Yes, it’s minor. But it suddenly got him talking about wills and annuities and trusts and who to call (we’ve always kept our finances separate but he’s afraid he’s going to die and wants to make sure my son and I are taken care of). I guess be grateful for small things!

And then I realized, he’s going to die. Maybe not before me, but he will. We just celebrated our 22nd anniversary (actually been together 33 years and I want credit for it all!), and we’ve had our problems through the years. But I suddenly realized I loved him. What will life be like without him? We’ve been together more than half my lifetime. I don’t know what I will do if he is no longer there.

OK, so I’ll get the TV back (no more Bill O’Reilly) and I won’t have to pick up his ski coat off the floor, where he throws it when he comes home. And I won’t have to listen to any more diatribes about how Bernie Sanders will drive us to taxation hell.

You know this day will eventually come. But it just all seems so soon now.

Research has shown that 52 percent of Americans over 65 will not have enough money to maintain their style of living when they retire — because we haven’t wanted to think about dying. We haven’t made plans, so afraid of our impending mortality. Didn’t we all think we’d live forever? We were the Baby Boomers, after all!

As I said, I had an early preview so maybe it’s easier for me. But I still see my husband as the tall, skinny tennis star walking off the court with his trophy (and if I’m honest, me, too, in my short shorts and halter top).

He’s still athletic but his hernia has turned him into an old man overnight. Because of the pain, he’s had a hard time walking (and forget about getting in and out of the car!). It hasn’t stopped him from working at the two dental clinics he helps out at in New York, or even from using the elliptical and stationary bike at home.

But he still walks very, very slowly and it’s like getting a taste of the future.

Hopefully, the surgery will reverse that. But there’s no getting around it. We’re getting old.

I’m hoping next week he’ll be back to complaining that the paper towels are running out and returning to his endless “Camp Larry” Sundays, where he exercises for four hours at a stretch.

But I’m starting to think it’s the beginning of the end. Or maybe, it’s just the end of the beginning.

Complete Article HERE!

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Philosophy of Everyday Life: What are the lessons people most often learn too late in life?

By Evan Asano

Mind-full-or-mindful

Learn how to listen. So few people can really listen and so many people genuinely appreciate when you do.

Learn when it’s time to move on. From jobs, people and relationships. Not everything is fixable. Cut your losses and move on.

None of the best experiences of your life will happen staring a computer screen, a phone screen or a TV. If you want more of the best experiences of your life minimize the time you spend in front of these three.

Take great care of your body. It’s delicate and becomes more so as you get older, but if you treat it well, it will treat you well. Exercise regularly, stretch or do yoga, eat wholesome food.

Take great care of your mind. Foster curiosity, read, learn and grow. Learn to be quiet, meditate and spend time in nature regularly.

Take great care of your heart. When you hold onto harmful emotions like anger, hurt, pain, you really only hurt yourself. When you practice love, compassion and generosity, your heart expands and grows.

You’ll spend too much of your life working, staring at a computer screen and sitting. If you’re going to do all these things, find a work environment or shared purpose that’s fulfilling and creates meaning.

Success comes most readily when you find fulfillment and create value in the world.

Learn how to compliment people and do so regularly. There’s no limit on how many compliments you can offer, there’s no scarcity of compliments available and there’s no end to how much people will appreciate them.

Learn how to accept a compliment and do so whenever one is offered. You’re conditioned to deflect compliments. Recognize how you do this and practice recognizing and accepting when the universe acknowledges what you do.

Learn how to be generous. You can’t attract what you don’t give. Share your knowledge, your time, your thoughts, your wisdom, and your charity.

Learn how to be patient.

Practice gratitude. Everyday.

Great stories come from great experiences. Chase those experiences.

It’s not that time moves by faster as you get older, you just start to have fewer new and captivating experiences. If you can continue those experiences and expand your curiosity, time won’t feel like it flies by as so commonly described.

Complete Article HERE!

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With Fear, Determination And Poetry: How Great Writers Face Death

By The NPR Staff

Maurice Sendak
Children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, who died in 2012, spent much of his life obsessed with death. In 2011 he told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross: “There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”

Katie Roiphe’s preoccupation with death goes back to her childhood, when she contracted virulent pneumonia at the age of 12. She was sick for a year and thought she was going to die.

Her terror of death was reignited many years later when her father died. It was then that Riophe found herself turning to great minds to see how they confronted mortality.

She initially told herself that she wanted to “understand it better,” she tells NPR’s Melissa Block, but she soon realized that was a lie. “I was actually trying to see it,” she explains. “It sounds really simple, but it’s actually a very difficult thing to do. So that was my goal, to sort of focus in really closely on the final days of these writers and thinkers, and just look.”John Updike

In The Violet Hour, Roiphe describes the last days of Sigmund Freud, James Salter, Maurice Sendak, Susan Sontag, John Updike and Dylan Thomas. She talks with Block about how these writers and thinkers accepted, or railed against, their fate.

Interview Highlights

On John Updike, who wrote poems in the hospital after being diagnosed with lung cancer

It was amazing. He had very little time — just weeks before he was dead. I actually went up and looked at the manuscripts and you can see in his handwriting how arduous it was. At that last moment, when most people would just be watching television or railing against the universe, that was what he did and I found it very moving. …

The poems have a sort of quality of reporting — that he’s bringing news. And he talks about writing as turning pain into honey, which I find a really beautiful way to think about what writers do: taking this incredibly awful — maybe the most awful thing that can happen to you — and turning it into honey just with words.

On Susan Sontag, who endured brutal treatments for cancer

She had written so eloquently about the importance of not turning illness into a metaphor — of not embellishing and fantasizing and being really realistic and rational when it comes to your own illness — and she was unable to do that ironically in her own life. …Susan Sontag

She thought to herself she would be the exception even to the rule of mortality. That somehow, as she had with her earlier cancers famously, she was going to defeat death in some way. And even though the odds were against her — she was 71-years-old getting a bone marrow transplant — even in those situations, she felt this time she wouldn’t die.

At the one hand, it’s the opposite of a good death, it’s almost the anatomy of how you don’t want to die. On the other hand, I did see something kind of heroic in the power and force of her will.

On how mortality was a constant companion for writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak

He was certainly preoccupied with death for his entire life, and one of the things that fascinated me about him is the way, in his art and famous children’s books, he worked on this problem year after year. Like when his parents died, or when his brother died, he just kept working on this problem and worked it through in drawing after drawing and draft after draft. And he sort of came out freeing himself to a certain extent from this obsession. He was very depressed at certain points of his life and he used his art as a way of countering that. It was a sort of medication for that almost.

On Sendak owning John Keats’ death mask

It’s really very beautiful. When I saw it — he has it in a guest room with a blue bedspread — there are kind of stuffed animals on the bed. It’s a very bizarre scene and very Sendak, and I thought to myself, “Who would ever want to own Keats’s death mask?”The Violet Hour

And then I looked at it and I realized I knew exactly why you’d want to own Keats’ desk mask: Because in a way what I was doing in this book was writing death masks. That urge to preserve the moment, and Annie Leibovitz did it with her famous photographs of Sontag, and Sendak himself drew the people he loved: his partner of many, many years after he died, and his family members right before they died.

There’s something about capturing that moment in art that I actually do completely understand — both the reason you’d make Keats’ death mask and the reason you’d want to own it.

On her idea of what a “good” death would be

I feel like the thing that mostly happened with this book is I came away marginally less afraid, which sounds like not that a big deal. But given my panic about death at various points in my life, [this] was liberating to me. In terms of a good death, I did feel that this prolonged medical struggle of a Susan Sontag where you’re chasing after any possibility of medical salvation seemed like not a good idea, and the way of working your way into accepting what’s happening the way Sendak did and the way Updike did seems preferable to me.

But one doesn’t always have control, and that was one of the things I really realized in writing about these deaths.

Complete Article HERE!

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The Top Five Regrets of Dying People

By Bronnie Ware

regrets-dying_mirror2

A nurse in end-of-life care shares the most common regrets of the dying

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind.

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.

People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learned to never to underestimate someone’s capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.

regrets-dying_hands
People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

regrets-dying_i-love-you
We often regret the things we didn’t say

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Often they would not truly realize the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

Many don’t realize til the end that happiness is a choice
Many don’t realize til the end that happiness is a choice

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

Complete Article HERE!

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What the words of a dying doctor taught me about life’s meaning

BY REBECCA RUIZ

when-breath-becomes-air

When I learned of the late Paul Kalanithi’s memoir When Breath Becomes Air, which published earlier this year, I felt drawn to its premise. A young doctor with great ambition receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and reports back from the twilight of his life on his quest to seek and find meaning.

Feeling unsure of my own purpose in life, I wanted Kalanithi’s journey to become a beacon to guide my own wandering. Perhaps, I hoped, he might be some kind of oracle.

But that is not the design of Kalanithi’s gripping, emotional book. You, dear reader, are not meant to passively observe Kalanithi’s final moments, glean his wisdom and walk away feeling assured in your path.

Instead you will bear witness to his yearning, suffering and grace. You will watch as lung cancer annihilates his dreams of becoming a renowned neurosurgeon and doctor-philosopher. You will ask yourself if you’ve ever worked as hard as Kalanithi, who commits himself to relentless hours as a medical resident performing high-stake surgeries — even as he tries to dodge death.

As unbearable as that sounds, the pull of this narrative is magnetic. More than a year into parenthood, I hadn’t finished a single book — yet I could barely put down When Breath Becomes Air. Almost nothing else felt as important.

That the book demands your presence is a credit to Kalanithi’s captivating prose. Whether he is describing in vivid detail a midnight hike in the Eldorado National Forest (“pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky”) or his desire to bridge the worlds of literature and neurosurgery (“I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force”), Kalanithi’s sentences are both urgent and poetic.

Others in a similar position might be tempted to sanitize their life. Here’s a man who is candid about his marital troubles. He confesses that he finds himself drifting into becoming a doctor who just goes through the motions:

All my occasions of failed empathy came rushing back to me: the times I had pushed discharge over patient worries, ignored patients’ pain when other demands pressed. The people whose suffering I saw, noted, and neatly packaged into various diagnoses, the significance of which I failed to recognize — they all returned, vengeful, angry and inexorable.

Kalanithi even admits that he suspected cancer months prior to the official diagnosis. His account would have been richer with an exploration of why he dismissed those prescient instincts, but the reader can’t fault a man who has so little time for self-examination.

When Breath Becomes Air is an imperfect book, but it draws its power and permanency from those limitations.

Kalanithi died before finishing the memoir in March 2015, at age 37. His final passage is a moving dedication to his infant daughter (and is followed by an explanatory epilogue from his wife). But before he writes those tender words, he leaves the reader with a gift of their own:

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect stage. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.

Kalanithi makes no attempt at reassurance. The end is not tidy or filled with comforting platitudes. He makes no effort to find a reason in his death. I had read every page with anticipation, waiting for Kalanithi to share adages born of introspection and tragedy, I had missed the point all together.

Kalanithi’s wisdom lay in wrestling with the toughest questions humans can ask of themselves, even if they go unanswered. That bravery, standing at the edge of the abyss with fortitude, is what gives us meaning. And it’s what made Kalanithi a courageous doctor and human being.

When Breath Becomes Air is essential reading in a world where we try so hard to exercise control over the unpredictable. While the miracles of science and technology are worthy of our praise, we lose something vital when we forsake ambiguity for certainty.

Kalanithi understood that we learn who we are when we remain still in moments of confusion and crisis, when we pause to ask the terrifying questions. And then we keep moving forward even when it feels impossible.

“I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” Kalanithi wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’”

Complete Article HERE!