FrankOstaseski

I once worked man who wanted to take his life because of his terminal lung cancer. Right before he died he said I am happier now than I have ever been. He told me his joy didn't come from things or the activities of life but from his attention. He said, "now my pleasure comes from the softness of the sheets in the coolness of the breeze." Bringing our attention to the details of life we often discover a gratitude for simply being alive.

Great question. I think people who have been willing to live into the deeper dimensions of what it means to be human have an easier time with dying. For some that ease comes through religious or spiritual practices or training. I don't think those things are necessary for people to have a peaceful death. I worked with a man who was an atheist. He described what he thought would happen after he died. He said that his body was basically energy and that he would become molecules and mix with all the other molecules in the universe. He was quite comfortable with his dying. Idealized notions of a “good death” or a “dignified death” are troubling to me. They can blind us to what is actually happening, causing us to override the unpleasant and trample the sacred. Arbitrary standards about things “going according to plan” exert enormous pressure on dying people, adding guilt, shame, embarrassment, and a sense of failure to an already challenging process. Dignity is not an objective value. It is a subjective experience. Care with dignity promotes self-respect, honors individual differences, and supports people in the freedom to live their lives and their deaths according to their personal wishes. When we interfere, we may miss out on or even interrupt the subtle dimensions of the dying experience. No matter how noble our intentions, we need to resist the temptation to act on our own biases or impose our well-meaning advice or spiritual beliefs on people who are dying. Hannah was a Christian scientist with a deep and unwavering faith in God. At ninety-three, she had arrived at a place of acceptance of her death. She told me that her image of death was “to rest in the hands of Jesus.” Hannah’s well-meaning granddaughter, Skye, came to visit. Skye shared that she had been reading a number of books on near-death experiences. According to these books, at the time of death, people are often greeted by their deceased relatives. Skye said, “Grandma, you don’t have to worry, because when you die, everyone you know who died before you will be there to meet you.” When she heard this, Hannah became terrified of dying. The secret she had never shared with her family was that her husband, Edgar, had physically abused her for a good portion of their married life. He had died five years before. The idea of meeting Edgar again “on the other side” and spending eternity with him filled Hannah with desperation.

Our support of someone who is dying needs to include mindfulness, warmth, authenticity, stability, and generous listening. This allows us to enter the question of dying without so many answers. Being with dying calls for humility, acceptance, and a willingness to let go of control.

1. Not having loved fully is the most common disappointment.
2. sure at times I feel overwhelmed. When I'm working with some of his dying I'm always looking at my own fear my own grief. But I've learned that when I'm aware fear it means there is a part of me who can relate to the fear. That means fear is not the only thing in the room. We can relate from fear or from our capacity to witness our fear. Death is the elephant in the room. A truth we all know but agree not to talk about. We try to keep it at arm’s length. We project our worst fears onto it, joke about it, attempt to manage it with euphemisms, sidestep it when possible, or avoid the conversation altogether. We can run, but we cannot hide. We can run, but we cannot hide. There is an old Babylonian myth, “Appointment in Samarra,” which W. Somerset Maugham retells in his play Sheppey. A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for supplies. But the man returns a short while later empty-handed, pale, and shuddering with fear. He tells his boss that a woman in the crowd bumped into him. When he looked at her more closely, he recognized her as Death. “She looked at me and made a threatening gesture,” the servant says. “Now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there, Death will not find me.” So the merchant lends his servant his horse. The man rides off in a wild fury. Later, the merchant goes to the marketplace to buy his own supplies. There, he sees Death and asks why she threatened his servant earlier that day. “That was not a threatening gesture,” Death replies. “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

Yes I think about my death often. When I'm in contact with the precariousness of life it causes me to appreciate its preciousness. Then I don't want to waste a moment. I want to step in fully and use my life in responsible way. Without a reminder of death, we tend to take life for granted, often becoming lost in endless pursuits of self-gratification. When we keep death at our fingertips, it reminds us not to hold on to life too tightly. Maybe we take ourselves and our ideas a little less seriously. We let go a little more easily. When we recognize that death comes to everyone, we appreciate that we are all in the same boat, together. This helps us to become a bit kinder and gentler with one another.

Ideally awake....with pain and symptoms skillfully addressed...content with my life....companioned by people I love who don't interfere with the process...or try to hold me back. Resting in a more open awareness. However, I think that grasping at a certain outcome may be a formula for suffering. My hope is that i can work with whatever cards I am dealt. In Buddhism, the old Pali word for suffering is dukkha, which is sometimes translated as “anguish” or more simply as “unsatisfactoriness” or even “stress.” Dukkha arises from ignorance, from not understanding that everything is impermanent, unreliable, and ungraspable—and wanting it to be otherwise. We wish to claim our possessions, our relationships, and even our identities as unchanging, but we can’t. All are constantly transforming and slipping right through our fingers. We think we need the conditions of our lives to reliably give us what we want. We want to construct an ideal future or nostalgically relive a perfect past. We mistakenly believe this will make us happy. But we all can see that even those people who realize extraordinary conditions in life still suffer. Even if we are rich, beautiful, smart, in perfect health, and blessed with wonderful families and friendships, in time these will break down, be destroyed, and change . . . or we will simply lose interest. On some level, we know this is the case, yet we can’t seem to stop grasping for those “perfect” conditions.