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 (c) 2003 A Good Death We die the way we live. I watched my mother struggle against the odds all of her life, work hard to make things happen all on her own, no matter what obstacles there were to overcome. And I watched her struggle against dying. "I want to be finished!" she says, pounding her chest with one fist. Then she hollers passionately for another piece of ice, which I place in her mouth. She yells, "The will to live! The will to live is there!" and then, a few moments later she says, "Oh it is so sad! Everything I do is toward living!" She saw the dying coming, and she wanted to die consciously. She grew impatient for death to come and take her, for the struggle to be ended. Some weeks she was maintaining at a fragile level, other days she seemed clearly to be just hours away from passing. And so I wondered, what is she waiting for? Who among us is holding her here? Is her soul engaged in some unseen and unfinished process? IT'S ALRIGHT WITH ME IF YOU GO When my mother's mother was sent to a the nursing home, Mother visited her every week for months and told her, "It's okay if you go." And so I am doing that for my mom.It takes a great deal of inner work to be able to say that to your mother or anyone you have loved. To look into the eyes of this person whose body is so clearly fading, whose will to live may still be fluttering from time to time, and to say, "It's alright with me if you go. I will miss you but I will be alright." I cannot tell you why but I feel certain that this is an important tool in spiritual care of the dying. But it must be done so gently, from the heart, in a way that neither wishes for the person's death nor for their continued existence in the body. And that, my friend, takes alot of thinking and working through. A person's death is everyone's spiritual activity. A woman is dying: her fundamentalist Christian brother prays she will repent and accept Jesus Christ as her savior. Can he release this need and find it in his heart to say, "It's okay with me if you go?" Her daughter is angry with her for all the things children stay angry at parents for. Can the daughter work her way through the anger and release it so that she can truly let her mother go? Because when Mom dies, there are no more opportunities to be angry with her. Then we are simply left with our own feelings, which are inclined to burn their way to some kind of inner truth. If you would like to email me your experience with a loved one who has died, I would very much like to know and might use the ideas in a paper I am writing. What does it mean to die awake?
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We die the way we live. How to prepare for a good death, a conscious death. Copyright © renewed annually Sheridan
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