Tag: Death Meditation

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Growing My Faith in the Face of Death

I spent a lifetime counseling others before my diagnosis. Will I be able to take my own advice?

By Timothy Keller

I have spent a good part of my life talking with people about the role of faith in the face of imminent death. Since I became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1975, I have sat at countless bedsides, and occasionally even watched someone take their final breath. I recently wrote a small book, On Death, relating a lot of what I say to people in such times. But when, a little more than a month after that book was published, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I was still caught unprepared.

On the way home from a conference of Asian Christians in Kuala Lumpur in February 2020, I developed an intestinal infection. A scan at the hospital showed what looked like enlarged lymph nodes in my abdomen: No cause for concern, but come back in three months just to check. My book was published. And then, while all of us in New York City were trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, I learned that I already had an agent of death growing inside me.

I spent a few harrowing minutes looking online at the dire survival statistics for pancreatic cancer, and caught a glimpse of On Death on a table nearby. I didn’t dare open it to read what I’d written.

My wife, Kathy, and I spent much time in tears and disbelief. We were both turning 70, but felt strong, clear-minded, and capable of nearly all the things we have done for the past 50 years. “I thought we’d feel a lot older when we got to this age,” Kathy said. We had plenty of plans and lots of comforts, especially our children and grandchildren. We expected some illness to come and take us when we felt really old. But not now, not yet. This couldn’t be; what was God doing to us? The Bible, and especially the Psalms, gave voice to our feelings: “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off?” “Wake up, O Lord. Why are you sleeping?” “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?”

A significant number of believers in God find their faith shaken or destroyed when they learn that they will die at a time and in a way that seems unfair to them. Before my diagnosis, I had seen this in people of many faiths. One woman with cancer told me years ago, “I’m not a believer anymore—that doesn’t work for me. I can’t believe in a personal God who would do something like this to me.” Cancer killed her God.

What would happen to me? I felt like a surgeon who was suddenly on the operating table. Would I be able to take my own advice?

One of the first things I learned was that religious faith does not automatically provide solace in times of crisis. A belief in God and an afterlife does not become spontaneously comforting and existentially strengthening. Despite my rational, conscious acknowledgment that I would die someday, the shattering reality of a fatal diagnosis provoked a remarkably strong psychological denial of mortality. Instead of acting on Dylan Thomas’s advice to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” I found myself thinking, What? No! I can’t die. That happens to others, but not to me. When I said these outrageous words out loud, I realized that this delusion had been the actual operating principle of my heart.

The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that the denial of death dominates our culture, but even if he was right that modern life has heightened this denial, it has always been with us. As the 16th-century Protestant theologian John Calvin wrote, “We undertake all things as if we were establishing immortality for ourselves on earth. If we see a dead body, we may philosophize briefly about the fleeting nature of life, but the moment we turn away from the sight the thought of our own perpetuity remains fixed in our minds.” Death is an abstraction to us, something technically true but unimaginable as a personal reality.

For the same reason, our beliefs about God and an afterlife, if we have them, are often abstractions as well. If we don’t accept the reality of death, we don’t need these beliefs to be anything other than mental assents. A feigned battle in a play or a movie requires only stage props. But as death, the last enemy, became real to my heart, I realized that my beliefs would have to become just as real to my heart, or I wouldn’t be able to get through the day. Theoretical ideas about God’s love and the future resurrection had to become life-gripping truths, or be discarded as useless.

I’ve watched many others partake of this denial of death and then struggle when their convictions evaporate, and not just among the religious. I spent time as a pastor with sick and dying people whose religious faith was nominal or nonexistent. Many had a set of beliefs about the universe, even if they went largely unacknowledged—that the material world came into being on its own and that there is no supernatural world we go to after death. Death, in this view, is simply nonexistence, and therefore, as the writer Julian Barnes has argued, nothing to be frightened of. These ideas are items of faith that can’t be proved, and people use them as Barnes does, to stave off fear of death. But I’ve found that nonreligious people who think such secular beliefs will be comforting often find that they crumple when confronted by the real thing.

So when the certainty of your mortality and death finally breaks through, is there a way to face it without debilitating fear? Is there a way to spend the time you have left growing into greater grace, love, and wisdom? I believe there is, but it requires both intellectual and emotional engagement: head work and heart work.

I use the terms head and heart to mean reasoning and feeling, adapting to the modern view that these two things are independent faculties. The Hebrew scriptures, however, see the heart as the seat of the mind, will, and emotions. Proverbs says, “As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” In other words, rational conviction and experience might change my mind, but the shift would not be complete until it took root in my heart. And so I set out to reexamine my convictions and to strengthen my faith, so that it might prove more than a match for death.

Paul Brand, an orthopedic surgeon, spent the first part of his medical career in India and the last part of his career in the U.S. “In the United States … I encountered a society that seeks to avoid pain at all costs,” he wrote in his recent memoir. “Patients lived at a greater comfort level than any I had previously treated, but they seemed far less equipped to handle suffering and far more traumatized by it.”

Why is it that people in prosperous, modern societies seem to struggle so much with the existence of evil, suffering, and death? In his book A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor wrote that while humans have always struggled with the ways and justice of God, until quite recently no one had concluded that suffering made the existence of God implausible. For millennia, people held a strong belief in their own inadequacy or sinfulness, and did not hold the modern assumption that we all deserve a comfortable life. Moreover, Taylor has argued, we have become so confident in our powers of logic that if we cannot imagine any good reason that suffering exists, we assume there can’t be one.

But if there is a God great enough to merit your anger over the suffering you witness or endure, then there is a God great enough to have reasons for allowing it that you can’t detect. It is not logical to believe in an infinite God and still be convinced that you can tally the sums of good and evil as he does, or to grow angry that he doesn’t always see things your way. Taylor’s point is that people say their suffering makes faith in God impossible—but it is in fact their overconfidence in themselves and their abilities that sets them up for anger, fear, and confusion.

When I got my cancer diagnosis, I had to look not only at my professed beliefs, which align with historical Protestant orthodoxy, but also at my actual understanding of God. Had it been shaped by my culture? Had I been slipping unconsciously into the supposition that God lived for me rather than I for him, that life should go well for me, that I knew better than God does how things should go? The answer was yes—to some degree. I found that to embrace God’s greatness, to say “Thy will be done,” was painful at first and then, perhaps counterintuitively, profoundly liberating. To assume that God is as small and finite as we are may feel freeing—but it offers no remedy for anger.

Another area of head work for me had to do with Jesus’s resurrection. Ironically, I had already begun working on a book about Easter. Before cancer, the resurrection had been a mostly theoretical issue for me—but not now. I’m familiar with the common charge that any belief in an afterlife is mere wish fulfillment without grounding in fact—and that belief in Jesus is in the same category as faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But over the past 20 years, I’ve been drawn to the work of the British biblical scholar N. T. Wright, who mounts a historical case for Jesus’s bodily resurrection.

I returned to his material now, with greater skepticism than I had previously applied. I didn’t want to be taken in. But as I reread his arguments, they seemed even more formidable and fair to me than they had in the past. They gave me a place to get my footing. Still, I needed more than mental assent to believe in the resurrection.

The heart work came in as I struggled to bridge the gap between an abstract belief and one that touches the imagination. As the early American philosopher Jonathan Edwards argued, it is one thing to believe with certainty that honey is sweet, perhaps through the universal testimony of trusted people, but it is another to actually taste the sweetness of honey. The sense of the honey’s sweetness on the tongue brings a fuller knowledge of honey than any rational deduction. In the same way, it is one thing to believe in a God who has attributes such as love, power, and wisdom; it is another to sense the reality of that God in your heart. The Bible is filled with sensory language. We are not only to believe that God is good but also to “taste” his goodness, the psalmist tells us; not just to believe that God is glorious and powerful but also to “see” it with “the eyes of the heart,” it says in Ephesians.

On December 6, 1273, Thomas Aquinas stopped writing his monumental Summa Theologiae. When asked why by his friend Reginald, he replied that he had had a beatific experience of God that made all his theology “seem like straw” by comparison. That was no repudiation of his theology, but Thomas had seen the difference between the map of God and God himself, and a very great difference it was. While I cannot claim that any of my experiences of God in the past several months have been “beatific,” they have been deeper and sweeter than I have known before.

My path to this has involved three disciplines.

The first was to immerse myself in the Psalms to be sure that I wasn’t encountering a God I had made up myself. Any God I make up will be less troubling and offensive, to be sure, but then how can such a God contradict me when my heart says that there’s no hope, or that I’m worthless? The Psalms show me a God maddening in his complexity, but this difficult deity comes across as a real being, not one any human would have conjured. Through the Psalms, I grew in confidence that I was before “him with whom we have to do.”

The second discipline was something that earlier writers like Edwards called spiritual “soliloquy.” You see it in Psalms 42 and 103, where the psalmist says, “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” and “Bless the Lord, O my soul. And forget not all his benefits.” The authors are addressing neither God nor their readers but their own souls, their selves. They are not so much listening to their hearts as talking to them. They are interrogating them and reminding them about God. They are taking truths about God and pressing them down deep into their hearts until they catch fire there.

I had to look hard at my deepest trusts, my strongest loves and fears, and bring them into contact with God. Sometimes—not always, or even usually—this leads, as the poet George Herbert wrote, to “a kind of tune … softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, exalted manna … heaven in the ordinary.” But even though most days’ hour of Bible reading, meditation, soliloquy, and prayer doesn’t yield this kind of music, the reality of God and his promises grew on me. My imagination became more able to visualize the resurrection and rest my heart in it.

Most particularly for me as a Christian, Jesus’s costly love, death, and resurrection had become not just something I believed and filed away, but a hope that sustained me all day. I pray this prayer daily. Occasionally it electrifies, but ultimately it always calms:

And as I lay down in sleep and rose this morning only by your grace, keep me in the joyful, lively remembrance that whatever happens, I will someday know my final rising, because Jesus Christ lay down in death for me, and rose for my justification.

As this spiritual reality grows, what are the effects on how I live? One of the most difficult results to explain is what happened to my joys and fears. Since my diagnosis, Kathy and I have come to see that the more we tried to make a heaven out of this world—the more we grounded our comfort and security in it—the less we were able to enjoy it.

Kathy finds deep consolation and rest in the familiar, comforting places where we vacation. Some of them are shacks with bare light bulbs on wires, but they are her Sehnsucht locations—the spaces for which she longs. My pseudo-salvations are professional goals and accomplishments—another book, a new ministry project, another milestone at the church. For these reasons we found that when we got to the end of a vacation at the beach, our responses were both opposite and yet strangely the same.

Kathy would begin to mourn the need to depart almost as soon as she arrived, which made it impossible for her to fully enjoy herself. She would fantasize about handcuffing herself to the porch railing and refusing to budge. I, however, would always chafe and be eager to get back to work. I spent much of the time at the beach brainstorming and writing out plans. Neither of us learned to savor the moment, and so we never came home refreshed.  

A short, green Jedi Master’s words applied to me perfectly: “All his life has he looked away to the future, the horizon. Never his mind on where he was.” Kathy and I should have known better. We did know better. When we turn good things into ultimate things, when we make them our greatest consolations and loves, they will necessarily disappoint us bitterly. “Thou hast made us for thyself,” Augustine said in his most famous sentence, “and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” The 18th-century hymn writer John Newton depicted God as saying to the human soul, “These inward trials I employ from pride and self to set thee free, and break thy schemes of earthly joy that thou would find thine all in me.”

To our surprise and encouragement, Kathy and I have discovered that the less we attempt to make this world into a heaven, the more we are able to enjoy it.

No longer are we burdening it with demands impossible for it to fulfill. We have found that the simplest things—from sun on the water and flowers in the vase to our own embraces, sex, and conversation—bring more joy than ever. This has taken us by surprise.

This change was not an overnight revolution. As God’s reality dawns more on my heart, slowly and painfully and through many tears, the simplest pleasures of this world have become sources of daily happiness. It is only as I have become, for lack of a better term, more heavenly minded that I can see the material world for the astonishingly good divine gift that it is.

I can sincerely say, without any sentimentality or exaggeration, that I’ve never been happier in my life, that I’ve never had more days filled with comfort. But it is equally true that I’ve never had so many days of grief. One of our dearest friends lost her husband to cancer six years ago. Even now, she says, she might seem fine, and then out of nowhere some reminder or thought will sideswipe her and cripple her with sorrow.

Yes. But I have come to be grateful for those sideswipes, because they remind me to reorient myself to the convictions of my head and the processes of my heart. When I take time to remember how to deal with my fears and savor my joys, the consolations are stronger and sweeter than ever.

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Professor emeritus has last words on death and dying

Professor emeritus Ronald Bayne was one of Canada’s first geriatricians and a lifelong advocate for better care for older adults. Dr. Bayne, shown here receiving his honorary doctorate at McMaster in 2006, died on Friday after deciding to take advantage of the opportunity for medical assistance in dying.

Dr. Ronald Bayne was one of Canada’s first geriatricians and spent much of his long career as a passionate advocate for better care for the elderly, working to solve the problems in long-term care homes.

At 98, and racked with chronic pain, he turned his advocacy to another cause critical to the elderly: planning the end of life.

Bayne, who was a professor emeritus of McMaster University, died on Friday after deciding to take advantage of the opportunity for medical assistance in dying.

Before dying, he shared his story with the media and produced a compelling video urging seniors and their families to take control of the end of their lives.

The 12-minute video is a powerful demonstration of Bayne’s passion for the cause to the very end, part reflection on death and dying, part rallying cry for better health care and autonomy for the elderly.

“I’m 98 so I am near the end of my life. Fortunately, my mind is still clear though my body is exhausted,” he says in the video.

“I want the vast majority of the population, and seniors in particular, to realize that they have far more control at the end than they realize they do. Every Canadian has the right to control their own bodies. There’s no question about it. You are legally entitled, and you must insist that your voice is heard.”

In the video, Bayne is eloquent and passionate, referring to Dr. William Osler and Shakespeare and his long experience in health care.

“I had a long career as a physician and over these many years I’ve been struck by the fact that increasingly people are fearing death and dying. I think it’s become almost universal,” he says. “People themselves have become fearful about what may happen at the end of their lives, and if they’re going to be suffering great pain, if they’ll get relief.

“I want people to get over this fear of the unknown and make it known. Discuss it openly, realizing that death is inevitable.”

He says everyone has the right to end their life if it has become unbearable. “Some people say that’s promoting death. Of course it’s not promoting death. Death is inevitable, you don’t need to promote it. No, this is to reduce suffering and pain. And if you as a person are not likely to pass on soon, you should be able to control your own end of life.”

Trained at McGill University, Bayne was a professor of medicine at McMaster’s Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine from 1970 until he retired as a professor emeritus in 1989.

He received an honorary degree from McMaster in 2006 for his advocacy and work raising awareness of the need for better care of the elderly and chronically ill people, and his initiation of programs that work to prevent the warehousing of often marginalized populations.

It is clear from the video that his passion for this work continued through the very end of his life.

“We must have our voices heard. That’s what I’m urging people to do in later life,” he says in the video. “Take that responsibility. Let us ensure that the health-care system for long-term care is properly organized and managed and supervised.

“We know, from recent experience with COVID, that these long-term institutions were very poorly managed, and in a way, the general public is justified in their fear of what will happen to seniors in those places,” Bayne says, suggesting the seniors need to realize they have more control than they think they do.

“We as seniors should be working with our families to discuss the end and how we wish it to occur and building up their [family’s] feeling of confidence that it will be peaceful for us and bearable for them. So instead of focusing on the end, build up great memories, happy memories that the family will treasure afterwards.”

Bayne had a close relationship with the university over the years, and 13 of his family members have McMaster degrees, including the honorary degree awarded his son-in-law, Michael Hayes, in 2017.

Bayne and his wife Barbara have made several donations to the university, establishing the Ronald Bayne Gerontology Award for a graduate student conducting aging research; and the Barbara and Ronald Bayne Award to provide support for senior students in the Department of Health, Aging and Society who are engaged in practical learning experience as part of their undergraduate studies.

“Dr. Bayne has been a wonderful teacher for all of us from his days at McMaster helping create geriatrics as its own discipline in Canada, to just before his death,” said Paul O’Byrne, dean and vice-president of the Faculty of Health Sciences. “I am very grateful for all of his lifelong contributions to improving the health of Canadians.”

Parminder Raina, scientific director of the McMaster Institute for Research on Aging, added: “One of Canada’s first geriatricians and a physician at Mac, Dr. Bayne founded the Hamilton-Wentworth Group on Aging, the Gerontology Research Council of Ontario (GRCO) and led the Canadian Association on Gerontology in the ‘80s. His tireless work in the area of geriatrics and gerontology drove the infusion of a lot of provincial funding into research and training in aging at a crucial time.

“His powerful messages around death and dying are inspiring and important.”

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I chased the American dream.

It brought me back to my father’s deathbed in China.

Mangkuk Wong, the author’s father, in 1987.

By Xiaoyan Huang

I thought for sure he was dead: Whenever I cannot reach my father, now 86, I am convinced the day has come and that he has died alone in his apartment. It was nearly midnight in Shenzhen, China. I tried calling him on WeChat, on his cell, on his landline. No answer. I called his friend to check on him. He answered the doorbell that night and seemed okay, she reported. The picture she sent, though he was smiling, did not reassure me. I’m a cardiologist in Portland, Ore. One look at my father’s ashen color told me his end was near. A week later, he was hospitalized and diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer.

This event had a cruel symmetry, echoing what happened in 2003 when my mother suffered a fall and massive brain bleed. Same apartment. Same hospital. Even the pandemics, then and now, involve related viruses: SARS and the novel coronavirus. My mother had gone into a coma by the time I reached her bedside. After months of hospitalization, she was discharged home, comatose. My father kept her alive in a persistent vegetative state for five more years, with hired help and tube feeds, nearly bankrupting himself. Throughout that time and long after, I was overtaken by guilt. Thirty-four years ago, my parents supported their only child to pursue her education in the United States. It pained me to realize that as a physician, I was unable to save my mother’s life, and as a U.S. citizen, I never gave her the good American life she had asked of me.

This time, I was determined to do right by my father. Though I managed to leverage my connections as an established American cardiologist to get him VIP treatment in his local hospital, he adamantly declined further diagnostic testing or care. My father, a retired university professor, is fiercely independent, a loner. He told me he had lived a long, good life and wanted to die on his own terms. When I gently suggested getting a colonoscopy, tissue biopsy and perhaps advanced cancer therapy, he got mad: “I am fine, I can walk to the crematorium myself!”

Palliative and hospice care are not widely supported in China. When loved ones fall ill, spouses and children often show over-the-top devotion, fearing judgment by other family members and by society at large. In cases of terminal illness, the patients themselves almost never participate in discussions about the severity of the condition (a situation depicted in the 2019 film “The Farewell”). Family members are expected to pursue more aggressive treatment, even if medically futile, espousing blind optimism. The higher the price tag, the better the demonstration of filial piety. Dying at home is generally avoided because of superstition. In China, my father faced intimidating cultural stigma against his wish to stop treatment and die peacefully at home.

I wanted to support him, but it would mean figuring out his end-of-life care on my own. After consulting an oncologist friend, I packed my suitcase full of over-the-counter comfort care medicines. I also had to make arrangements to put my life on indefinite hold — applying for family medical leave, rescheduling appointments, asking colleagues to cover my patients and administrative duties, saying goodbye to my husband and children with no set return date.

Decades ago, I was fortunate enough to attend college in America on a full scholarship. Now it would take every inch of my immigrant success — leaning on all my resources and institutional affiliations — to take the return trip on which I would probably lose my remaining parent and sever my last tie with China. Travel during the pandemic is dauntingly difficult: I needed a special family emergency visa, two negative coronavirus tests within 48 hours of my flight and a time-stamped health clearance bar code from the Chinese Consulate. There were only a handful of flights between the countries each day; it was impossible to buy tickets online. With the help of a childhood friend’s wife, who runs a travel agency in China, I got one. The plane was packed. Everyone wore N95 masks, some with double masks, others with goggles, face shields, hazmat suits and gloves. The flight attendants wore disposable surgical gowns. People hardly ate or drank during the 15-hour flight, trying to minimize bathroom trips.

For two weeks, I was quarantined in a hotel room in Xiamen after landing. The first night, on a sleepless high, I made grandiose plans for catching up on emails and work. By day five, I started exercising by putting all 20 hotel-provided bottles of water into a backpack and pacing the room: 14 steps long, six steps wide, over and over. By day seven, each banging of the door by the hotel staff, announcing meals delivered to a chair outside, made me jump — as did the twice-daily temperature check. Finally, after 14 days and 11 negative coronavirus tests, I was released into the world.

When I finally got to my father’s bedside, suitcase in tow, it was almost anticlimactic. For a surreal second, I felt I was rounding on an elderly patient, as I do every day in my hospital. Reunion in Chinese style, even in such weighted circumstances, is restrained. No matter how many times I had cried in private, there would be no embrace, not even a handshake, no tears in front of him. I instinctively checked on key physical exam findings: Was his neck vein elevated, and legs swollen, suggesting congestive heart failure? I stopped myself just short of probing his abdomen. My hand went, instead, to tuck him into his comforter. At this moment and going forward, I wanted to be only his daughter.

A few days later, I brought my father home. Together with a friend of his, I took care of him: shopping for and cooking his favorite meals; helping him shower and dress; dispensing his few remaining pills. Back in his own environment, my father instantly began feeling better, eating more. We still don’t use the word “cancer” or talk openly about his prognosis, but this feels like neither denial nor forced optimism. Instead, we focus on the concrete tasks at hand. When he has energy, I sit by his bed listening to him talk about his life, about history, philosophy and technology. I tell him about his grandsons and their girlfriends, my work and my life.

I began this journey initially stricken by grief, and by fear of reliving the guilt my mother’s death had induced. But I came to appreciate an unexpected symmetry: Years ago, my parents sacrificed to set me free and allow me to pursue a new life in America. In returning to China, I sacrificed to set my father free and help him have a good death. The first choice is relatively common and often celebrated; the latter is unconventional, even frowned upon — seen as almost unnatural in a culture that prioritizes extending life. But the limbo of quarantine, and all the hurdles I had to surmount en route, brought me to a realization: how important it is, for the living and the dying, to share a moment of peace. In that moment, love is no longer measured by the quantity of pills, the number of CT scans or the extent of heroic medical interventions, but by time spent together.

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Between The Rhymes

— Writing Universal Songs

by

One of the biggest challenges any songwriter faces is how to turn their own story into a universal story that an artist and millions of his or her fans will like. Most of us find it relatively easy to write OUR story, but much more challenging to write our truth in that universal way.

Early in my career, I wrote a song that I thought I crafted very well. It was called “She Stopped Livin’ The Day He Died”. It was the sad but true story of my grandmother who was so dependent on my grandfather that, when he passed away at age 51, just spent the next 25 years of her life in a sad place.

I painted beautiful pictures of their life together before he passed away. I described his job at the factory and her life as a homemaker. I even used their real names in the song. When I played it for my family, they cried. I thought I had a masterpiece.

So, I confidently walked in to my publisher’s office and told him I “thought I had one”. That’s what we said when we thought we really nailed a song. He listened carefully to my song all the way to the end. I was ready for the “Way to go!!! Garth will love this!!”

It never came. Instead, his response was “That’s the saddest crap I ever heard.” He wasn’t one for sugar-coating anything. I was so upset. I couldn’t imagine why he didn’t love my song.

I asked him what was wrong with the song and he simply said “Garth doesn’t want to tell his audience YOUR grandmother’s sad story night after night.” He went on to explain that the key to writing a hit song was telling MY story in a way that millions of people relate it to THEIR story.

It took a while to sink in, but I finally realized that there is a difference in a great, well written song and a great, well written hit song.  What’s the difference?  Universal emotion.

My publisher challenged me to take my song about my grandmother and find the universal emotion behind it.  So, I spent weeks playing and studying that song until I finally thought I had it figured out.

The universal idea or emotion behind my song was that losing someone sometimes makes us feel like a part of us died.  So, I started working on song ideas that would express that feeling in a more universal and less personal way.

First, I decided that writing about someone dying might limit my chances.  Not many artists are searching for songs about death.  There’s no better way to bring a crowd down at a concert than to start singing a good death song.  That idea led me to a more universal (and positive) thought.

I realized that losing someone you love doesn’t have to be talking about dying.  In fact, more people would relate if I wrote a song about losing a love interest just because the relationship ended.  Armed with that knowledge, I looked through my title database and found the perfect title! 

It just so happened I was headed to my publisher’s cabin to write with him (Kim Williams) and Danny Wells.  Both Kim and Danny already had hits.  I did not!  So, I came armed with a bunch of strong ideas.  The first one I threw out was “While You Loved Me”.  Here’s the lyric we wrote.

While You Loved Me
If I ever write the story of my life,
Don’t be surprised if you’re where it begins
Girl I’d have to dedicate every line on every page
To the memories we made while you loved me

CHORUS:
I was born the day you kissed me
And I died inside the night you left me
But I lived, oh how I lived
While you loved me

I’d start with chapter one, love innocent and young
As the morning sun on a new day
Even though I know the end, I’d do it all again
‘Cause I got a lifetime in while you loved me

CHORUS:
I was born the day you kissed me
And I died inside the night you left me
But I lived, oh how I lived
While you loved me

Copyright 2000 Sony/ATV Music

That song expresses the same universal emotion as my song about my grandmother, but in a MUCH more universal way.  Almost everyone can relate to being broken up with by someone you love.  Only my family can relate to my grandmother’s story.

Rascal Flatts cut an amazing record, “While You Loved Me” went on to sell a million records and it became my first top ten hit, landing at #7 on the Billboard chart.  And, it was inspired by the story of my grandmother. 

All of that to say, the key to writing a hit is finding YOUR truth and then finding the UNIVERSAL truth behind it.  That universal truth is the ticket to success as a songwriter.

All the best,
Marty Dodson

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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‘The Bitter Comes With The Sweet’

— Without Death, There Is No Life

By Mara Buchbinder

In the early days of the pandemic, my days were bookended by stories of death. I woke up each day hours before dawn to work on my book manuscript, happy to have a passion project to soothe my anxious energy. My book chronicles how Vermont patients, caregivers and health care providers navigated medical aid-in-dying, in the aftermath of legalization. In the morning, I combed through my notes, writing feverishly about dying, and in the evening, I absorbed the news of bodies accumulating around the world more quickly than they could be buried.

I have never been more acutely aware of my own mortality. I offered my husband detailed instructions about how to tend to my unfinished manuscript, should the need arise. We joked, with gallows humor, about how my death would make an ironic capstone to the book; he, of course, agreed to pen the afterword for the posthumous publication.

Studying medical aid-in-dying, and now living through the greatest pandemic in 100 years, has forced me to reckon with mortality. Over the five years that I’ve collected stories about death and dying, people have often questioned how I could study such a morbid topic. Isn’t it depressing? The answer is, anything but. Humbling and grounding, yes, and at times terribly sad, but never depressing.

An avid reader since childhood, I have always taken great comfort in stories. When the pandemic began, I realized that immersing myself in stories about death had actually helped me. Thinking about my own inevitable death is sad, but it doesn’t terrify me anymore. At 40, I hope I have a great many years left, but I’m also more or less at peace with my finitude.

Yet last spring, when I picked up Natalie Babbitt’s novel “Tuck Everlasting” to read to my 7-year-old son, I realized it was this book that first made me address my mortality, some 30 years ago.

If the concept of mortality was terrifying to me, the idea of immortality was even more so.

Published in 1975, “Tuck Everlasting” takes place in the 19th century, 87 years after the Tuck family unwittingly drinks from a magical spring that renders them immortal. The story is set in motion when a 10-year-old girl, Winnie Foster, accidentally discovers their secret. They bring her to their woodland cottage to persuade her to keep quiet, warning her of the catastrophe that would ensue if news of the spring were to become public.

The novel quickly charmed educators and parents, winning numerous literary awards. While it captivates young readers with its lyrical prose, its matter-of-fact philosophizing on life and death set it apart. In a key scene, Angus, the patriarch of the Tuck family, explains to Winnie that dying is an unavoidable part of the “wheel of life.” The bitter comes with the sweet. It is the difference between having a life and merely being alive. You can’t have living without dying.

The Tucks haunted my childhood. To my 10-year-old self, it seemed clear that the only thing scarier than dying was not dying. How awful it would be to outlive nearly everyone that you love! How bleak it would feel to be resigned to a life of complete social isolation. If the concept of mortality was terrifying to me, the idea of immortality was even more so.

This is precisely what the author had in mind. Babbitt wrote the book to tame the worries of her daughter Lucy, who was then 4-years-old. Babbitt wanted to help Lucy understand that dying was a natural part of the wheel of life, that not dying is much less desirable than it may seem.

Flipping cultural scripts on fears about death: this is the power of stories.

As a non-fiction author, I write for reasons not so different from Babbitt’s. I use real people’s stories to examine cultural fears about death — in my case, about lack of control over dying. Medical aid-in-dying offers what is, for many, a seductive vision of personal control over dying, and the promise of a peaceful, sanitized death. Yet such control often proves illusory, both because access to assisted death is much more complicated than it may seem, and because death, itself, is wily.

People have often questioned how I could study such a morbid topic. Isn’t it depressing? The answer is, anything but.

I think about a woman in her mid-60s I’ll call Candace, who developed metastatic cancer. Once it was clear that she was not going to get better, Candace decided to die on her own terms, with medical assistance. She procured the lethal prescription, which was no easy feat, because many physicians are reluctant to participate in the process. By the time she was ready to die, however, she was no longer able to ingest the medication.

The pandemic has made me even more sure that, like Candace, we are not in control of our destinies. But the Tucks weren’t in control, either. They waited passively, resigned to let the oppressive unfurling of time wash over them. In this sense, immortality’s promise of control over death is also illusory. It is poignant that the Tucks look forward to the day, every 10 years, when their sons return to the family cottage. During the pandemic’s eternal spring, when days bled into weeks and then months, I identified with this feeling, marking my days with UPS deliveries, as time moved ever so slowly.

During the pandemic, I have been in the fortunate position of being able to forestall illness and death with the appropriate precautions, such as staying at home. These measures should permit me to avoid the wrong sort of death. (There is universal agreement at this point that dying from COVID-19 is the wrong sort of death.) But I cannot avoid death altogether, nor (I think) would I want to

Now, 10 months into this crisis, my book is complete. The wheel spins on. The end of the pandemic no longer feels as far off and impossible as it did last spring. And still, I wonder what kind of story I am in. I marvel at that wonder.

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‘Dear Life’ explores the beauty of end-of-life experiences

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Before the doctor opened her mouth, you knew this wasn’t going to be good.

And it wasn’t, although you can barely remember what happened a minute after you heard the diagnosis. All you could wrap your head around were monitors and tubes and machines and death, when what you needed was “Dear Life” by Rachel Clarke, and a reminder that it wasn’t time for that yet.

When she was a little girl, Rachel Clarke was in awe of her father, a doctor who loved music and nature and who shared his sense of curiosity with his children. As a teen, Clarke toyed with the idea of following in his footsteps, but she chose a career in television instead. And then one day, after experiencing a couple of close brushes with death, she decided to go back to school to become a doctor, specializing in palliative medicine.

“I learned that dying, up close, is not what you imagine,” she says. “It is the essence of living… that really matters…”

About death, there are two main things: unlike our ancestors, we aren’t used to it; and we can’t know what it’ll be like. These are what Clarke helps her patients and their families deal with, and while she can’t answer the latter question, she promises them that the days and hours before the end are as full of life as possible.

Sometimes, that means meeting fears head-on, and discussing death matter-of-factly. Sometimes, it’s asking questions of a patient because no one else has done so. Caring for someone who’s dying may mean literally opening a window to sunshine or birdsong, holding a hand, letting “a wife curl up in a hospital bed beside her dying husband,” or encouraging a visit from a pet or a beloved grandchild. And sometimes, a doctor just needs to remember that “There is always a spark of beauty or significance…in the life you have left,” even when the person dying is someone the doctor loves.

This year, no doubt, you’ve seen enough death to last several lifetimes, and you’re not sure you can withstand a book about it right now.

But hold on, because “Dear Life” lives up to its title.

Beautiful, thoughtful, and loving, this book is absolutely brimming with life as author Rachel Clarke describes the end-of-life care offered at the hospice where she works and some of the most memorable patients to whom she ministered care.

If that sounds like an anti-life book, well, it’s not. It’s true that people die in this book, and they do it often but Clarke’s accounts of their days prior to death are quiet and serene, with no fear, no pain, and the minimum of loose ends left. Her workplace is not a sterile, clinical home where people go to die; rather, it’s a place where people die but first, happiness sneaks in sometimes.

And for that, curiously, this book on death-and-life may be the balm your COVID-bruised mind needs now. Indeed, calm, truthful, and not too gory, “Dear Life” is good.

Another book to look for is “Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph” by David Shneer. It’s the story of a photo taken toward the end of World War II, and the emotion inside it. Part meditation, part history, this book is perfect for the historian, too.

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Near the end of life, my hospice patient had a ghostly visitor who altered his view of the world

By Scott Janssen

For months, as I’ve visited Evan as his hospice social worker, he has been praying to die. In his early 90s, he has been dealing with colorectal cancer for more than four years, and he is flat tired out. As he sees it, the long days of illness have turned his life into a tedious, meaningless dirge with nothing to look forward to other than its end. He’s done, finished. He often talks about killing himself.

On this visit, though, his depression seems to have lifted. He’s engaged and upbeat — and this sudden about-face arouses my suspicions: Has he decided to do it? Is he planning a way out?

“You seem to feel differently today than on other visits,” I say casually. “What’s going on?”

He looks at me cryptically.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asks.

It’s not the first time a patient has asked me this. People can have unusual experiences when they reach the end of life: near-death or out-of-body experiences, visitations from spiritual beings, messages delivered in dreams, synchronicities or strange behaviors by animals, birds, even insects.

“There are all kinds of ghosts,” I respond seriously. “What kind are you talking about?”

“You remember me telling you about the war?” he asks

How could I forget? He’d traced his long-standing depression to his time as a supply officer for a World War II combat hospital. The war, he’d said, had soured him on the idea that anything good could come from humans and left him feeling unsafe and alone.

“I remember.”

“There’s something I left out,” he says. “Something I can’t explain.” He goes on to describe one horrific, ice-cold autumn day: Casualties were coming in nonstop. He and others scrambled to transport blood-soaked men on stretchers from rail cars to triage, where those with a chance were separated from those who were goners.

“I’d been hustling all day. By the time the last train arrived, my back felt broken, and my hands were numb from the cold.”

He grimaces and swallows hard.

“What happened when the last train got there?” I ask softly.

“We were hauling one guy, and my grip on the stretcher slipped.” Tears roll down his face. “When he hit the ground, his intestines oozed out. Steam rose up from them as he died.”

Evan rubs his hands as though they were still cold.

“Later that night I was on my cot crying. Couldn’t stop crying about that poor guy, and all the others I’d seen die. My cot was creaking, I was shaking so hard. I even started getting scared that I was going insane with the pain.”

I nod, waiting for him to continue.

“Then I looked up,” he says. “Saw a guy sitting on the end of my cot. He was wearing a World War I uniform, with one of those funny helmets. He was covered in light, like he was glowing in the dark.”

“What was he doing?” I ask.

Evan starts crying and laughing at the same time. “He was looking at me with love. I could feel it. I’d never felt that kind of love before.”

“What was it like to feel that kind of love?”

“I can’t put it in words.” He pauses. “I guess I just felt like I was worth something, like all the pain and cruelty wasn’t what was real.”

“What was real?”

“Knowing that no matter how screwed-up and cruel the world looks, on some level, somehow, we are all loved. We are all connected.”

This turned out to be the first of several paranormal visits. Each time the specter arrived, he’d wordlessly express love and leave Evan with a sense of peace and calm.

“After the war, the visits stopped,” he says. “Years later, I was cleaning out Mom’s stuff after she died, and I found an old photograph. It was the same guy. I looked on the back, and Mom had written the words ‘Uncle Calvin, killed during World War I, 1918.’ ”

We talk some more, then I ask, “What does this have to do with your being in a better mood?”

“He’s back,” he whispers, staring out the window. “Saw him last night on the foot of my bed. He spoke this time.”

“What’d he say?”

“He told me he was here with me. He’s going to help me over the hill when it’s time to go.”

As I’m formulating more questions, Evan surprises me by asking one of his own.

“You ever have something strange happen? Something that tells you that no matter how bad it looks, you’re connected with something bigger, and it’s going to be okay?”

A memory flashes into my mind. It was 35 years ago. It was after midnight, and I was asleep in a graduate-student apartment at Syracuse University. A siren’s blare woke me, so loud it sounded like it was inside the room. Adrenaline pumping, heart pounding like a hammer, I sat up and wondered what had happened. Was it a dream?

From outside, I distinctly heard what sounded like a two-man stretcher crew talking.

“Bring it here quick,” one guy told the other. I heard a gurney being rolled across asphalt.

I went to the window and pulled back the curtain, certain there was trouble outside.

The night was silent. Nothing was stirring in the parking lot. No one was there.

Just before daybreak, Dad called to tell me that just a few hours earlier, my uncle Eddie had been killed in an automobile collision.

That was a tough day. As night fell once more, questions filled my head: Why did this happen? What was he experiencing when it ended? Was he scared?

On the kitchen table sat a beat-up radio; some kind of malfunction occasionally caused it to turn off or on for no apparent reason. As my questions swirled, the radio turned on, and I heard the opening chords of the Beatles’ song “Let It Be.”

Not being a fan, I’d never listened closely to the song before — but this time, I did. The music and words filled me with an almost otherworldly sense of peace and comfort. The song ended. Shortly after, the radio cut off.

For years, I tried to explain away those events. It must have been a dream, I told myself. Or some kind of fabricated “memory” to fool myself into thinking that uncle Eddie and I were connected in that moment. As for the radio, it was nothing but a random coincidence. Any other conclusion is just wishful thinking.

Inside, though, a part of me knew it was real.

After nearly 30 years as a hospice social worker, I’m certain of it. And I have patients like Evan to thank: dying patients who have convinced me that the world we inhabit is lovingly mysterious and eager to support us, especially during times of disorientation and crisis. It even sends messages of love and reassurance now and then when we’re in pain.

I return to the present. Evan is looking at me, waiting for an answer. I feel grateful that he’s pulled up these memories. Outside, a flock of crows takes off in unison from the branches of an ancient oak.

“Yeah,” I say with a nod. “I guess I have.”

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