Death Meditation – Page 70 – The Amateur's Guide To Death & Dying

July 22, 2012February 10, 2014

Mediation – Death vs Dying

— Nancy Meredith, November 1987

Death vs Dying
It’s not as if they are the same thing. Dying is still warm, still connected to life as we know it. Death is cold. Dying is letting go. Death is being gone. Death is something I don’t know anything about, except that embalmed bodies are poor representations of the people who once animated them. Neither is anything I like to think about. So I figure they are probably topics I should give some attention to, to try to write some of the feelings they engender.

If I Should Die Before I Wake
It was only recently that I realized how early I had lay me down to sleep. I began very late in life the struggle to wake up from the soft comfort of my habits and routines. It’s hard getting up out of a warm bed when you don’t know what the weather’s like outside.

Coming to Terms with Mortality
Thinking about my own death feels different from thinking about someone else’s, but both feel lonely. Both bring on a panicky “No! Not yet!” When I’m confronted with the death of someone who has touched my life, the feeling is that I should have done more, that there is unfinished business here. Guilt confused with feeling that we don’t always get dealt a fair hand.It’s easier to die symbolically than to be symbolically dead. I can imagine ways I mightdie, my reluctance to leave tempered with the need to comfort those I leave behind. There’s a bit of poignancy about it, bittersweet and loving. And I am still (somewhat) in control.But I have trouble going beyond dying to death. I am responsible for so much and so many right now. Who will do the work I’ll have left undone? Who will take care of the people I love and all the little things in my life to which I attach so much importance? Who will feed my cat? If I try this exercise long enough I sometimes experience a moment of clarity and a fresh perspective on what’s really important to do today, right now. But it’s never long before I tighten up with a renewed sense of urgency to do more, faster. When I notice reminders of my own mortality—a bleeding mole, tightness in my chest, recurring asthma—I inevitably resist. “No, not yet! I have too much to do!”

I don’t think I want to live forever. When I hear people speak of the immortality of the physical body as a viable option, I feel somewhat embarrassed, as I am by the part of the

Apostles’ Creed that avows belief in the resurrection of the body. My resistance to my own death seems to be not so much a reluctance to leave my body as an unwillingness to relinquish control. To trust that the people I love can get along without me very well.

Just Moving On
Dying must be a lot like moving from one place to another. I’ve said goodbye many times in my life. Life goes on—for me and for those I leave behind. But it feels lonely, especially at first, and the nostalgia for past lives never completely disappears.

A Taste of Humility
Raymond Kaiser observed that the bottom line about death is that sooner or later people are going to say “So what?” No matter how important you are in their lives right now, no matter how wonderful you are, they’re going to come to a place where they accept your

Mini-Deathsabsence and proceed with business as usual. Trying to experience how that feels is an exercise in humility. It defeats arrogance and renews trust in others and faith in the continuity of life.

Whenever I think of death—particularly my own—I feel lonely. On the other hand, all the dark, lonely times I create for myself are deaths of a kind. Whenever I allow myself to feel alone, detached from those around me, I am already, for a time, dead. I am saying No to life and embracing Not Life. Lately I’ve tried to bring the light of consciousness to these times, to experience them as mini-deaths, with the benefit of then being able to embrace life more fully. I emerge from the dark more sensitive to my connection with others in my life, more aware of their feelings, more caring about their needs. I am more present. Perhaps the value in practicing death is not so much to be able to die better, but to be able to live better.

Judgment
I don’t like death, and I cannot embrace it as “moving on to a better place.” I don’t like acknowledging its inevitability. I tremble before it. It constitutes, after all, a fall into the unknown. I recently signed up to be a Hospice volunteer. Maybe by helping others deal with imminent death—their own or that of someone they love—I can learn to look at death squarely and say, “So what?” but I don’t think I’ll ever like it.

July 19, 2012February 10, 2014

Meditation — RECONSTRUCTING THE CHANGING FACE OF DEATH

RECONSTRUCTING THE CHANGING FACE OF DEATH
— Charles Corr

A large number of people are filled with great anxiety or discomfort at the mere mention of the term death. And yet death is, after all, one of the few common denominators that we all share.

Others report that they do not know what to think or feel about death, and that this perplexity makes them unsure about taking part in inquiries related to death.

Exceptions to these prohibitions against the study of death are sometimes granted to theologians or philosophers on the ground that their work focuses on the spiritual dimensions of death.

These conflicting viewpoints remind us of the limitations of our own experience and draw attention to the important role our own attitudes and personal concerns play in determining whether and how we will deal with projects concerning death.

Death is not a single, monolithic entity; it is a complex and many sided dimension of human experience.

I think it is helpful to start out, not with large-scale philosophical or religious theories of the ultimate meaning of death, but with a more proximate and prosaic examination of those experiences and attitudes that are related to death and encountered in our daily lives.

Death is present in the cycles of growth and decay that we witness in nature, in the pets and other animals we bury as children, in the cemeteries and funeral homes that we drive past, and in numerous aspects of our daily experience. Yet we lack a direct contact with natural human death. We are the first “death-free” society.”

People in our society are increasingly likely to be born, grow to maturity, have children of their own without ever witnessing the natural death of a close relative or friend. This situation is unique in contrast with the experiences of other peoples and or other times in the history of our country.

One more point to acknowledge explicitly is that the face of death, as we perceive it, is composed both of cognitive and affective elements.

July 13, 2012February 10, 2014

Meditation – 7/13/12

EASTER SUNDAY, 1955

What are we? What have we become?
Light fills the picture, the rising sun,
the three of us advancing, dreamlike,
up the steps of my grandparents’ house on Oak Street.
My mother and father, still young, swing me
lightly up the steps, as if I weighed nothing.
From the shadows, my brother and sister watch,
waiting their turn, years away from being born.
Now my aunts and uncles and cousins
gather on the shaded porch of generation,
big enough for everyone. No one has died yet.
No vows have been broken. No words spoken
that can never be taken back, never forgotten.
I have a basket of eggs my mother and I dyed yesterday.
I ask my grandmother to choose one, just one,
and she takes me up—O hold me close!—
her cancer not yet diagnosed. I bury my face
in soft flesh, the soft folds of her Easter dress,
breathing her in, wanting to stay forever where I am.
Her death will be long and slow, she will beg
to be let go, and I will find myself, too quickly,
in the there-and-now moment of my fortieth year.
It’s spring again. Easter. Now my daughter steps
into the light, her basket of eggs bright, so bright.
One, choose one, I hear her say, her face upturned
to mine, innocent of outcome. Beautiful child,
how thoughtlessly we enter the world!
How free we are, how bound, put here in love’s name
—death’s, too—to be happy if we can.

— Elizabeth Spires

July 9, 2012July 10, 2012

PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

A READING FROM Pilgrim At Tinker Creek
BY Annie Dillard

I wonder how long it would take you to notice the regular recurrence of the seasons if you were the first person on earth. What would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days and nights? You could say, “it’s cold again; it was cold before,” but you couldn’t make the key connection and say “it was cold this time last year,” because the notion of “year” is precisely the one you lack. Assuming that you hadn’t yet noticed any orderly progression of heavenly bodies how long would you have to live on earth before you could feel with any assurance that any one particular long period of cold would, in fact, end? “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease”: God makes this guarantee very early in Genesis to a people whose fears on this point had perhaps not been completely allayed.

It must have been fantastically important at the real beginnings of human culture, to conserve and relay this vital seasonal information, so that the people could anticipate dry or cold seasons, and not huddle on some November rock hoping pathetically that spring was just around the corner. We still very much stress the simple fact of four seasons to schoolchildren; even the most modern of modern teachers will still muster some seasonal chitchat and set the kids to making paper pumpkins or tulips for the walls.

But there is always unseasonable weather. What we think of the weather and behavior of life on the planet at any given season is really all a matter of statistical probabilities; at any given point, anything might happen. There is a bit of every season in each season. Green plants–diciduous green leaves– grow everywhere, all winter long, and small shoots come up pale and new in every season. Leaves die on the tree in May, turn brown, and fall into the creek. The calendar, the weather, and the behavior of wild creatures have the slimmest of connections. Everything overlaps smoothly for only a few weeks each season, and then it all tangles up again.

Time is the continuous loop, the snake skin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child’s Slinky. Of course we have no idea which arc on the loop is our time, let alone where the loop itself is, so to speak, or down whose lofty flight of stairs the Slinky so uncannily walks.

July 1, 2012February 10, 2014