MY WEEKLY BLOG
When you graduate from this realm into the next, if you could leave one gift to the ones you love, what would it be? People leave letters for their families, videos, favorite articles of clothing, cherished
artifacts or homes and cars and money. These things are wonderful and they are tangible. They have weight, they spark memories. But if you could pick something intangible about yourself that would live on in someone else’s heart, what would you choose? What pearl of knowledge or wisdom would you want to leave behind? What would you like to be remembered for? What was your life about that you want to place in the hands of your survivors?
This pondering brings to mind a gift that a friend named Isa left me. She was 62, she was dying from cancer, it had been a long journey and she had been in a lot of pain. When it was clear that Isa’s time was up, a few friends and I gathered at her bedside. She was on morphine which she had decided to keep at a minimum so she could stay conscious. A woman she had known for years, they had walked a spiritual path together, sat on a chair and read passages aloud from the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. We were sitting on Isa’s bed when she lifted up her head and said, “I’m not ready to go yet.” She looked slightly troubled and we let her know that the timing was up to her. We would stay with her. She relaxed, closed her eyes, and dropped into a meditative state. We all breathed with her.
About twenty minutes later, Isa opened her eyes, they were bright and alive, and she said, “Oh, this isn’t so bad.” She died in the next moment. When she said those words, “Oh, this isn’t so bad,” she gave me and her other friends a glimpse into the possibility that dying was not so bad. In fact, it might be okay. I cried sad tears at the loss of her but I also cried tears of hope. She had given me a gift about the greatest mystery of life. Hope about death. I decided then and there that if it was in my power to remain conscious when I died and offer my people a final gift of hope like Isa did, I would do that. To me, that was the greatest thing that anyone could offer and if it was at my fingertips, I wanted to give it away.
Back in the eighties and nineties when AIDS was surging, I did volunteer work at a group hospice. I went to a there one day a week, I went from room to room and I saw that everyone dies in a different way. Some people die scared and others are peaceful. Some people are in great pain and they need heavy doses of morphine and others die in their sleep. Some people die holding a loved one’s hand and some people wait until they’re alone. There is no right or wrong way, no worse or better way to die. We are all on our own paths, we have all lived our lives differently, we have had different lessons
to learn, and we have no idea where, when or how we’ll die. But if I have a choice, I’d like to leave people some hope and soothing when I breathe my last breath.
I have observed that acknowledging and accepting impermanence is at the forefront of most of the Buddhist teachings. But focusing on and obsessing about death is not the point. Whatever is alive will die. Existence works that way and we can’t change it. We can stay in great physical shape. We can exercise our minds and we can make our faces look younger, but we can’t change our expiration dates. All we can do is try to make peace with it since there is no escaping the inevitable.
For me, acknowledging that makes me want to live life more fully because no matter what religion we follow, whether or not we believe in a higher power, which exercises we do and what we think comes next, we just don’t know when or how it will happen. We might as well enjoy our time here. I was lucky to have been there with Isa as she made her transition. It was a rare opportunity to be present with her and receive the lessons she was offering on her way out.
Sitting at someone’s death bed is rigorous and requires a great deal of letting go and keen focus. “Isn’t it depressing?” someone asked me.
“No,” I said, “not at all. In fact, I never feel as alive as I do when I witness someone leaving their body.”
I have held hands, prayed, breathed and listened when someone made the inevitable journey from the physical world into the vastness of the universe. It has always been a gift but the greatest one I ever
received was what Isa left behind. Hope. Less fear. Great possibility. The idea that dying might really be okay.
Death and dying expert Stephen Levine said, “Dying is perfectly safe. Everyone is doing it.”
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