Robert Fulghum, a UU minister who wrote a book several few years ago called “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” tells the story of choosing the place where he would one day be buried. After thinking about options for some time he chose a plot in the oldest cemetery in Seattle and, because sometimes records of just who was buried where were not always accurate, the cemetery policy was that a grave had to be dug up before it would be sold to someone. The goal, clearly, was to not have any surprises down the road.
Fulghum decides he wanted to be there for the exploratory digging. And he writes how he was stunned by the experience. His words now: “Now I (had) stood beside empty graves before. But never beside my own. For days I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. Not only was the man in the mirror going to be buried here. I was.”
Fulghum writes that as a minister there has always been a distance between his thoughts about his own death and what he was called upon to do in relation to the deaths of others. After all, he says, he was a professional. He says that he could empathize with the funeral director who said to him: “I make the mistake of thinking death happens to other people, but not undertakers.”[1]
The truth is we all are going to die someday. It will be something we’ll all experience. Even for undertakers and ministers. And each of us, I expect, have our particular images or thoughts about death. Or perhaps we mostly choose the path of denial. We often hear about the deaths of congregants or loved ones of congregants when we gather here on Sundays. We may even imagine our own death being announced here one Sunday.
But each of us is shaped by our particular experiences with death. In my own life the death of my father when I was just seven years old has very much shaped me. It took me years to work my way through all that, including for years some unstated assumption that I too would die young. But that experience has also made me pretty fascinated by death most of my life. I’m really curious about all of it.
Recently I had the experience of talking with someone well into middle age who said that they had managed to go through life with relatively few losses up to this point. Now they find themselves exploring the territory of loss and grief. “I kind of feel like I missed that lesson until just very recently. It feels like I have some catching up to do.”
Yes, we each come to have our own particular relationship to death and its meaning. More often than not, from my experience, it is not something a lot of us may not think a whole lot about. In fact denial may be one of the primary ways that our culture deals with death.
I love the line, I think it is attributed to Freud, “If one of us should die first, I think I would go and live in Paris.” Yes, maybe others will die… but will we?
This week we’ll mark the third anniversary of when so many things in life shut down in the midst of the Covid epidemic. Our church services went virtual. Kids all of a sudden were attending their classes online. Many of the regular places we were used to going suddenly shut down. In person visiting with people we love suddenly was curtailed. In general life seemed to change overnight.
And here we are now three years later. Now we are kind of back to normal—or on some path. But what are the ways that life won’t go back to normal? What about our sense of safely in the world? What’s safe to do and what’s not? And what are the patterns we’ve come to know, by choice or by not, that will likely remain? What are those patterns, those habits, that are now in the past, not likely to ever come back?
To the extent that Covid may have brought life—and death—closer through these years, what lessons might it offer us in terms of how it is we live?
Frank Ostaseski is the co-founder of the Zen Hospice project in the San Francisco bay area. He says the awareness of dying can very much inform how it is we live. He says, “in light of dying, it’s easy to distinguish between the tendencies to lead us toward wholeness, and those that incline us toward separation and suffering.” He says we can harness the awareness of death to appreciate the fact that we are alive, to encourage self-exploration, to clarify our values, to find meaning, and to generate positive action. It is the impermanence of life, he says, that give us perspective.
Ostaseski summed up five lessons he has learned from years of working with people at the end of their lives. He sums them up in these guiding principles in how we might live—and also die.
- Don’t wait.
- Welcome everything, push away nothing.
- Bring your whole self to the experience.
- Find a place of rest in the middle of things.
- Cultivate don’t know mind.
Those are not bad principles to follow no matter what we are doing. Ostaseski says they have served him as reliable guides for coping with death. And, as it turns out, they are equally relevant guides to living a life of integrity.[2]
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 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. I often hear the words quick and peaceful in this context. But 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.
All too often in our culture the dominant model for dealing with death is what has been called the medical model. In that model death is something to fight against, something to be held off as long as possible, no matter the cost, no matter what it may mean for quality of life.
In his book entitled Being Mortal, Atul Gwande,[3] a medical doctor, 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 in our country. 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. Often family no longer live close by but sometimes far away. And perhaps most of all advances in medicine made it possible for people to live a lot longer than before. Now many of those advances were truly miraculous but sometimes there could also be 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.
But the growth of the modern hospice movement, among other things, has offered some other models for how it is we might die well. Some of those models actually view 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. 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.[4]
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 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 served All Souls Church in New York for many years and who preached from this pulpit more than once. He died in his mid-60s from esophageal cancer about ten years ago and wrote beautifully and openly about that 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 again of Mary Oliver[5]:
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
This being mortal is not always easy work. None of us, of course, can know for sure just what that journey will be for us. Sometimes it is more difficult than we imagine. But it is the work of a lifetime—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. May that love guide us in all our days. May it comfort us, may it keep us. Roots hold us close. Wings set us free. Amen.
Benediction
As you go from this place, in all your days may you give yourself to love. And may that love hold you no matter what life brings. Go forth from this place in love. Go forth in peace. Amen.
[1] From Beginning to End: The Rituals of Our Lives by Robert Fulghum. Villard Books, New York, 1995, pp 29-35.
[2] The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski. Flatiron Books New York, 2017, pp 1-14.
[3] “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” by Atul Gwande, Metropolitan Books, 2014
[4] https://onbeing.org/programs/ira-byock-contemplating-mortality/
[5] From poem “When Death Comes,” by Mary Oliver.
Topics: Compassion