Of all the spiritual themes we have explored through the years, the theme of death has gotten more response than any other—by far. And that probably isn’t a surprise when you think about it.
Death, after all, is one of those subjects most of us learn early on that we just don’t talk about. Yes, we’re all going to die but let’s put off the conversation as long as we can. There’s a line, attributed to Freud, I think, that has summed that up for me: “If one of us should die first, I think that I would go and live in Paris.”
Death is part of life we know on some deep level. We are all on the journey and we know that we will all come to the end of that journey at some point. But we live in a culture that all too often denies that reality. Have you noticed that more often than not we avoid saying someone has actually died? We say they passed, or passed away, or transitioned. But we often avoid saying they just plain died.
Years ago in seminary I took a class on memorial services and the professor said that there is one thing you absolutely have to do in a memorial service—you need to say that the person has died. It is important to name the reality of death.
We often hear about the deaths of congregants or loved ones of congregants when we gather here on Sundays. Last Sunday I announced six deaths, something close to a record. And in those announcements we hear some of the details of a person’s life—their age, where they were, prayers for the family they leave behind, sometimes perhaps a few more details.
But of course there are so many more things we will probably never know. What was that last moment, those last days or weeks or months, what were they like? Was it scary? Was it peaceful, maybe a relief? What regrets did they have, in the end? Who was there? And maybe sometimes who wasn’t there?
We are all shaped by our experiences with death and the losses we have known. We are shaped beliefs we have come to hold about the end of life.
A formative event for me was the death of my father when I was quite young. His death was sudden and confusing and kind of scary. It was a long time—well into adulthood—before I felt like I had some understanding of his death.
I expect that may be part of why, for most of my life I’ve been pretty fascinated with death. I remember when I was in junior high our class toured the local funeral home and how fascinated I was. I recall being pretty sure that I wanted to go into the funeral business.
Perhaps because of that early loss, for many years my own internal narrative was that I was going to die young. It was just something that was there and looking back I was hardly aware of it. That continued for a long time it seems until some point in my 20s—I’m not sure what caused it—but I had the realization that maybe I was not going to die young, that I may well be around for a while.
And the next question was an important one. If I wasn’t going to die young, then the question became what was I going to do with my life?
Part of the mystery of death is the way that it so very much informs our living. That realization that we are not going to be around forever means that every moment is precious and that every moment is a gift. Death very much informs our lives.
Now I should say here that death can take so many forms. There are the deaths that fit into what I might call the order of things—we get old, we slow down and we die. We don’t have a lot of unfinished business. And there are the deaths that don’t so much fit into the order of things—the loss of children, or young people, deaths that are at the hand of violence or prejudice. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to fit those into what we might call the order of things.
Those deaths that don’t so much fit into the order of things are the ones that can be the most difficult, the hardest to put into some larger context. Those are the deaths that we especially bring into our living and sometimes take a lot of work to find our way through. Or maybe we don’t—maybe we get stuck along the way.
What most of us want, hope for, I think, is to be able to have what we might call a good death. And sometimes, in modern culture, that can actually be more difficult than we might think. One of the complexities at living in this particular time in history is that we live amid incredible medical achievements. People now survive things that a generation or two ago would have meant death. And yet there can also be a way that all of those advances can actually mean that it can be hard to die well.
A couple years ago a book was published entitled Being Mortal by Atul Gwande.[1] If you haven’t read it, I recommend it to you. Gwande is a medical doctor and he talks about just how complicated growing older and dying well in our culture can be. He says that there was a major shift in the period following World War 2 that changed the norms around growing older. The most common way until that time was that a person grew older at home with their family. Getting older, and dying, was something we were around and more a part of life. Family members were around. Dying was more part of living.
But in the modern era those norms came to change. More people live their last years in nursing homes and other facilities, away from family. Gwande points to a number of factors: people began to live longer, more women worked outside the home and therefore taking care of loved ones at home became more difficult; more often children didn’t live close by their parents like they had at one point. And perhaps most of all the model came to be what Gwande called the medical model. Advances in medicine made it possible for people to live a lot longer than before and many of those advances were truly miraculous. But sometimes there was a downside to those advances. Sometimes people live longer but at the expense of their quality of life. Gwande gives many examples in his book, including the case of his own father who lived with a tumor on his spine, where that balance of longer life and quality of life is hard to know.
Death in our modern medical system can be hard to accept.
Former Oregon Governor Barbara Roberts wrote a book some years ago about the last months of her husband Frank’s life and the grief process that she went through. She recounts the conversation with the doctor when Frank was told he had an inoperable cancer and only a few months to live. When asked what the next steps were the doctor said he should begin another round of chemotherapy. They were surprised. But how much longer would that give him? 4-6 weeks… but it would also mean that he would be sick most of that time and the quality of his life would be comprised. Roberts chose to not take that path but to explore hospice care. His last months were not easy but he was able to have what Roberts described as a good death, one where his final wishes were fulfilled.[2]
That medical model often sets up a win-lose proposition when it comes to dying. In those terms death is the end of a battle that we are always going to lose. But might there be some other way? I think we may be ahead of the curve here in the Northwest. One of the gifts, I think, with the Death With Dignity movement is that it does give people the option of choosing to end their life when they are ready. But I think an even more important thing is that it has led to a great deal of attention of palliative care and making sure that someone is as pain free as possible and as comfortable as possible in their last days.
My experience as a pastor is that most people aren’t necessary all that scared of death. We don’t like the idea of leaving our loved ones but we do, at least at some level, acknowledge that reality. If anything, I think our thoughts aren’t so much focused on what will happen in the afterlife as much as how our deaths will happen, what the circumstances will be. Will we be in pain, what will we be able to do about it? Will I have time to say goodbye?
I think we all have the wish of being in control of things, certainly that is true for us Unitarian Universalists, and it is not at all clear to what extent we can be in control. And perhaps that’s where the fear can come in. It was Woody Allen who said, “I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
There is much that we can’t control when it comes to the end of our lives, and acknowledging that is important. But it is also important to make our wishes known and to have our affairs in order. That is a gift not only to ourselves but to those we leave behind when we die.
The truth is that the process of dying can very much be a sacred time. It is a life passage when we are really able to be present with what is most important.
Dr. Ira Byock is a palliative care doctor and he talks about how death is more than a medical event. It is, he says, a developmental stage, just like adolescence, or getting older, and seeing it simply through its medical dimension we can miss out on the possibilities it offers to end life well. These are some of the questions he might ask as we approach the end of life:
• Are there things that are more important than living longer?
• What are you scared of?
• What are you willing to give up to get the life you want in the time you have left?
And he asks the question of what would it look like to actually be well and to be in the process of dying at the same time? That throughout life, even in death, we manage to maintain a sense of wellness, a sense of integration as a person through all the stages of life?
One of the opportunities that dying can represent is that it is a reminder that we don’t have forever. That is probably why it is when someone is dying we have those conversations that are easy to put off.
As a person who does quite a few memorial services, I can tell you the most painful parts are hearing the stories where people die with unfinished business. Words that are not said. Forgiveness that has not been offered or accepted. Hopefully at the end of life we are given the opportunity to get to that place of reconciliation, that place of healing. Doing the work we are asked to do is one of the gifts we can give to those we love.
So what might dying well look like?
Dr. Byock, the palliative care doctor, relates four short sentences, just 11 words of things to contemplate:
Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you.[3]
Those are good things to think about any time but particularly at the end of life.
The doctor reminds us that times when we can say those things most easily are the times “when you’ve just slammed on the brakes and just narrowly missed getting killed and you’re shaking like a leaf and you’re in a cold sweat, and everything just almost ended. .. he says that when it becomes really easy to pick up your cellphone and call your call your spouse or your parent or your child or your best friend and just say those things.
He says there is something in moments like that that just shakes us free. When we realize that we may not have a lot of time some things, some priorities become very clear. He says times like these can make Buddhists out of all of us—that they help us to shake off the illusion of immortality. Indeed as we live with the awareness that we could die at any time it opens us up in some fuller way to living.
Forrest Church was a well known Unitarian Universalist minister who died about a decade ago from esophageal cancer. And he wrote beautifully about the journey. “Death,” he said, “is not life’s goal, only life’s terminus. The goal is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for. This is where love comes into the picture. The only thing that can’t be taken from us, even by death, is the love we give away before we go.”
Words of Dorothy Monroe:
Death is not too high a price to pay
for having lived. Mountains never die,
nor do the seas or rocks or endless sky.
Through countless centuries of time, they stay
eternal, deathless. Yet they never live!
If choice there were, I would not hesitate
to choose mortality. Whatever Fate
demanded in return for life I’d give,
for never to have seen the fertile plains
nor hear the winds nor felt the warm sun on sands
beside the salty sea nor touched the hands
of those I love—without these, all the gains
of timelessness would not be worth one day
of living and of loving; come what may.
This being mortal is not always easy work. And dying well can sometimes it is more difficult than we imagine. But it is the work of a lifetime—of all of our lifetimes. Day by day, breath by breath, may we know that work and may that work be good.
Will you pray with me now?
Great spirit of life, be with us in our living. Be with us in our dying. Be with us in our loving. Help us to see each day as precious, as amazing. Help us to see how the most important thing we leave behind is the love we have brought into the world, the love that lives on even after death. In this season of thanksgiving may we give thanks for the love in our lives. May that love guide us in all our days. Amen.
Benediction As you go from this place, in all your days may you give yourself to love. And may that love hold you in your living and in your dying. Go forth from this place in love. Go forth in peace. Amen
[1] “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” by Atul Gwande, Metropolitan Books, 2014
[2] “Death Without Denial, Grief Without Apology: A Guide for Facing Death and Loss,” Barbara K Roberts, NewSage Press, Troutdale, OR, 2002.
[3] https://onbeing.org/programs/ira-byock-contemplating-mortality/
Topics: Death