Let's not have a sniffle-Let's have a bloody good cry.
And always remember the longer you live-The sooner
You'll bloody well die! - An old Irish ballad
Freud said that we do not have a concept of death and dying until the age of eight. I think it is more likely that not until fifty do we begin to understand that this life is limited and we are running out of time. We may experience the death of parents, and even some friends, and begin to experience the failing of our own bodies-weakened vision and hearing, reduced physical rigor, and increased aches and pains, all of which forces us to wonder about ultimate loss. Sort of. What prevents us from fully experiencing the possibility of death is an indescribable dread of no longer being. This applies not only to people who are comfortable and healthy but also to those who are sick and miserable. By any objective criteria, those whose lives may be considered not worth living will dread dying.
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying tells us that we should die peacefully, without grasping, especially if the cause of death is the exhaustion of our natural life span; a human being is like a lamp that has run out of oil. But when the need to prolong life is no longer warranted, we still make every effort to avert death. We make concessions, promises, and bargains with God, confess our wrongdoings, and ask for forgiveness. We still die. We die without full understanding of death, without truly experiencing it. Therefore, we forfeit this most powerful event of our lives, because we don't want to face the inevitable. The process of dying also must be lived.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, famous for her pioneering work On Death and Dying, describes the five stages the dying person goes through: denial (This couldn't be happening to me), anger (at anyone, including God), bargaining (I'll devote myself to--if cured), depression (Nothing works; helplessness and hopelessness set in), acceptance (resignation and coming to terms with their ending). Most people die while still struggling in one of the first four stages. There is always some melancholy of everything finished but very few come to terms with their ending with melancholy alone. Furthermore, acceptance means different things to different people. For some, it is concretely just putting their business of life in order-drafting their wills, preparing the proper transition of responsibilities, taking care of unfinished matters, saying good-bye to old friends and places. For some, the impending prospect of the end of life is a good reason to "drink deep from the well of the here and now." Such persons vigorously engage life for the remainder of their time, distilling from it the best with hurried zeal. They read more, they socialize more, they love more, they do more. Every minute now counts, and no time is wasted. For others, impending death prompts making previously avoided crucial decisions, undoing wrongdoings, expressing regrets, and requesting forgiveness. For yet others it means seeking God.
One can fully live one's life by recognizing its end, by focusing on death at the healthier times. In From Beginning to End, Robert Fulghum describes a caption for a photograph: "A man sitting on a folding chair in a cemetery, as a light rain fell and the sun shone at the same time, on the first day of summer in 1994." He muses:
He is sitting on his own grave. Not because his death is imminent-he's in pretty good shape, actually. And not because he was in a morbid state of mind-he was in a fine mood when the picture was taken. In fact, while sitting there on his own grave, he is reviewing his life confronting finitude-the limits of life. The fact of his own death lies before him and beneath him-raising the questions of the when and the where and the how of it. What shall he do with his life between now and then?
We all need such full-dress rehearsals.
T. Byram Karasu, M.D. author of The Art of Serenity
