Grief As Transformation

The movie, Cherry Blossoms is about life, death, love and the journey of spirit.

It is also about Butoh. I now understand Butoh. Life, death, love, grief and Butoh -- all the same.

My dearly departed friend, Marianne, danced Butoh. Another friend, Sika, has just taken it up. I never understood the attraction.  It seems slow and ponderous, requiring much heady focus. Although, I must admit, when Marianne danced in that slow, deeply internal way, I was mesmerized. Recently, Sikha did a short demonstration of Butoh and then broke into her familiar middle eastern dance. "Oh," I thought, "I like her middle eastern dance much better. She is much more vibrant and free."  But, no, it is all Butoh. Everything, you see, is Butoh.  Butoh is being in the moment. It is the wind on your hand, the dance of your shadow, the feel of the telephone next to your ear recalling the voice of your mother. If I were to write whatever came off my fingertips, without editing, and just posted it, that would be Butoh.

In the movie, Cherry Blossom, Rudi, a German business man, is given a terminal diagnosis. Only he doesn't know it. Only his wife, Trudi, knows. It must have been a terrible burden because she dies suddenly while on the trip that is to be Rudi's last adventure. "Rudi hates adventures," Trudi explains to the doctors who suggest the idea. "He would prefer nothing to ever change." Trudi, on the other hand, is a different spirit. She loves Butoh and has always wanted to go to Japan, to Mt. Fuji, to see the cherry blossoms -- an exquisite symbol of impermanence. Rudi, of course, is embarrassed by Trudi's love of Butoh and always puts off the trip to Japan, always thinks there will be another time. And, of course, there isn't.

Only after Trudi dies, does Rudi comes to appreciate who she really was. "A wild cat in a cage!" he tells a young Butoh dancer he meets in a park in Tokyo --- on the trip he should have taken years ago when Trudi was alive. And how many of us live our lives like Rudi, resistant to change, holding on to the sameness of a dull and routine life? Of like Trudi, for that matter, caging in our wildness to accommodate another?

The movie is about revelations, discovery and opening. Grief can do that, split you wide apart. Because when you have lost the love of your life, anything is possible. "There is no more fear," a woman said to me after losing her partner. "Nothing can be as bad. You have already lost everything." And so Rudi sets aside his dislike of change and the unknown and travels to Tokyo in honor his wife's desire. He go through a lot of change to truly find her, but he's up to the challenge. He befriends a young dancer of Butoh. She teaches him the dance, the dance with the wind on your hand, the shadow at your feet, the spirit of the dead. She dances with a pink telephone cradled to her ear recalling her deceased mother who was always on the phone. At last, they journey to Mt. Fuji to see the cherry blossoms. His act of abandon might initially be understood as homage to his wife. In our initial grief, we can be motivated to some act of bravery like dunking in the cold waters of the Pacific, or hiking up a mountain top, but really, it is not for the deceased. It is for the spirit, the evolution of soul made possible, made irresistible by the emptiness and greatness of loss. Grief is transformation, it is going into the void. It's Butoh.

Channeled Teachings About Life and Death

In my last blog, I explored some of the ways people get their ideas about life after death. Religion has been the primary source of these ideas throughout most of history. Since the advent of hospice and modern medicine, we now have the first-hand experiences of people nearing death (see Final Gifts) and those restored to life after dying (see Life After Life). These new sources have provided a somewhat consistent picture of the initial phase of death, e.g. appearances by the dead, out-of-body consciousness, effulgent light, life review, celestial guidance, etc. For a more fleshed out picture, however, people have sought details from the dead themselves. This information arrives in four distinctive ways: via mediums,through past-life recall, by Instrumental TransCommunication, i.e. electronic devices, and in dreams. Real? Silly? Fraudulent? Perhaps all three?

MEDIUMS

Psychically talented persons, called mediums enable contact with the dead through channeling and telepathy. In channeling, a deceased or other-worldly entity takes over the body of the medium in order to speak. The entrance of the entity is typically marked by a preparatory trance meditation by the medium followed by an awakening and noticeable change in posture, voice, mannerisms, and verbal expression indicative of the new resident. It is very theatrical. Some mediums channel a single entity, others provide a multitude of characters, like a telephone operator switching to different lines, or a very good actor switching roles. In telepathy, the medium (perhaps lacking the requisite theatrical skills) is not taken over by the entity but rather hears (clairaudience), sees (clairvoyance) and/or feels (clairsentience) the messages of the dead. As in life, there seems to be a hierarchy in channeled entity world. Some are simply the dead relatives of bereaved families while others command a much wider audience as spiritual teachers  (e.g. Abraham, Art & Pursah, Michael, Matthew, Seth, the Akashic Records, Pleiadeans, Edgar Cayce).

Carolyn North, author of The Experience of a Lifetime: living fully dying consciously has written a very interesting piece, Life Post-Mortem on life and the afterlife gleaned from the published communications of ten or more channeled entities who appeared in either England, the U.S. or South Africa between 1909 and 1978. Their numbers included such notables as Arthur Conan-Doyle (author of Sherlock Holmes) and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) along with lesser-known personages. Both skeptical and intrigued, Carolyn was impressed by the consistency of description among the various entities, ". . .  although there was little chance that they (the channelers) could have either known each other or come across each others' accounts during their lifetimes, what they had to say was virtually identical across the board!" Below are a few quotes to inspire further reading.

• Regarding the difference between life and death, Dr. Myers, a deceased Cambridge scholar, says: The secret of death is to be found in the rate of speed at which the outer shell vibrates. For instance, a human being is primarily aware of the visible world about him because his body is traveling at its particular rate of speed. Alter the timing of your physical form and the earth, men, women and all material objects will vanish for you as you vanish for them. Death, therefore, means merely a change of speed. For the purpose of this change a temporary dislocation is necessary, for the soul must pass from one body traveling at a certain vibration to another traveling at a different rate or time.
• Diplomat and Far East adventurer, Joe Gascoigne, explains our earthly existence: The earth is a place where we learn and grow by experiencing life in matter. We repeat the process lifetime after lifetime until, by becoming literally "enlightened" we make ourselves accessible to Light by effacing layers of density until what is left is our most subtle core of being.
• Frances, an ex-nun, describes her experience of the life review: Somewhere in the depths of the mind two blueprints are brought forward into consciousness. These are so clear that one can literally take them out and study them. One is the Perfect Idea with which the spirit goes bravely into incarnation. The other is what results from an only partially-understood Plan - in fact, life as it is actually lived.
• On the various level of death, Arthur Conan-Doyle reports: The difficulty is to find adequate words with which to describe the conditions of life after death. Every soul must some day pass through a second death before it quits this first after-death plane. After experiencing a period of unconsciousness which may last for minutes, hours, days or even years, the soul then awakes to to a renewed, rich and vivid life when it sees truth revealed. With this in view, man advances into the mental conditions of his being, automatically migrating to the particular mental plane to which his soul is attuned.

I have personally witnessed a number of channelers in action. While their performances are quite captivating, I find myself unwilling to whole-heartedly accept their claims of entity inhabitation. It's not that I disbelieve in an afterlife or in the possibility of communications between the living and the dead. I am open to both. My reticence is due in part to the high potential for fraud and deception in the channeling trade. How very disturbing it would be to be duped. And the carefully orchestrated theatric quality of the channeling feeds my disbelief.

Popular in early 19th century United Kingdom and the United States and coinciding with the rise of Spiritualism, mediumship quickly fell into disrepute after several popular and widely followed mediums were exposed for the use of stage magic tricks to dupe their audiences. People do hate to be deceived. In her book, The Wheel of Life, death expert Kubler-Ross provided a contemporary example of this kind of metaphysical disillusionment. A trance medium she had followed for many years was exposed for sexual indiscretions along with faking much of his channeling. Although it utterly destroyed her belief in the medium, interestingly, it did not shake her belief in some of his channeled entities which she apparently met separately without the medium assistance. 

One often hear about the use of mediums and psychic during murder investigations.This certainly lend to their credibility. However, it is possible their  talents have been greatly exaggerated. For arguments on either side see Police Psychics: Do They Really Help Solve Crimes?, Wikipedia and Psychic Detectives. Scientific studies have attempted to test the psychic abilities of mediums. Only a few studies support their claims and those that do often suffer from procedural biases. For example, mediums were tested in the presence of their subjects and thus allowed access to non-verbal and physical clues regarding personal information -- much in the way Sherlock Holmes deduced impressive details about a person merely by noting their clothes, manner and the roughness of their hands. A more recent study conducted at the Windbridge Institute addresses these procedural issues by eliminating direct contact between subject and psychic. Even the person who contacts the medium is kept in the dark regarding the subject for whom the reading is to be given. Results of this study, reported in Explore: The Journal of Science & Healing 3, no. 1 (2007): 23-27, show some support for the psychic abilities of medium. However the study provides no indication of how mediums obtain their information, i.e. from the dead or otherwise.

An alternative explanation of how mediums get their information may be found in the holographic theory of quantum physicist, David Bohm on the interconnectedness of the universe. In a nutshell his theory postulates a higher order realm, the implicative order, from which everything manifests on the worldly level, the explicative order.

"Bohm suggests that the whole universe can be thought of as a kind of giant, flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time. The explicate order is a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality, and the apparent stability and solidity of the objects and entities composing it are generated and sustained by a ceaseless process of enfoldment and unfoldment, for subatomic particles are constantly dissolving into the implicate order and then recrystallizing." See David Bohm and the Implicative Order

Interpreted according to this theory, mediums obtains their psychic readings by tapping into the implicative order. Locality and contact with the subject of the reading is irrelevant because the information is everywhere. Interestingly, Bohm's theory of an implicative order, is consistent with the explanation of channeling given to me by a trance-medium I interviewed for a television show back in the mid-90's. This medium characterized channeling as tapping into a higher realm (like Bohm's implicative order) and extracting information. It is an ability, he told me, that we all share to varying degrees. Doing a Tarot reading or consulting the I Ching are common tools of taping into that other realm. 

I like Bohm's theory, it resonates with my own belief system. This brings up the other reason why I do not whole-heartedly believe in the channeling dead spirit -- my underlying belief system. Channeled entities and spirits do not quite fit in to my Sufi training and spiritual experiences whereas tapping into the implicative order does. How something "fit" with one's current beliefs is probably the way most of us judge metaphysical phenomenon and discriminate between the sublime and the ridiculous. Lest we chastise ourselves too much for our illogical reasoning, it is important to remember that even scientists are susceptible to this bias and are just as reluctant to welcome new theories that are at odds with their own. We are protective of our belief systems. They provide meaning to our world and make us feel comfortable. We do not let go of them easily

How does one arrive at a belief system regarding the afterlife? In my own case, it seems to be from a combination of life experiences, spiritual teachings, book reading, and slew of mind bending death stories from totally ordinary people.

My belief system, idiosyncratic as it is, allows me to appreciate the teachings, for example, of a famous channeled entity without actually believing in its existence. I totally believe in the law of attraction, while suspending my judgement regarding Abraham, the channeled entity. This is because when I put my mind to it, the law of attraction seems to works for me and it fits with my belief system. And even if I am deluding myself and everything is totally random, I'm still a happier person because law of attraction encourages a discipline toward positivity rather than complaining. "Don't complain, that only brings on more of the bad.  Think about what you want!" And doesn't thinking about what you want make you feel much more happy than thinking about what you don't want?

I had a stunning encounter with the Law of Attraction, long before I had ever heard the term. Just after my first summer camp with Sufi Master Adnan Sarhan, about 25 years ago, I found myself in Albuquerque on the way to a Pueblo ceremony with a car full of German Sufi students. I was driving my 1968 VW bus, which ceased functioning when I stopped to pick up my last rider. For a moment I considered crying and gnashing my teeth, my usual response to auto malfunctions. However, having just completed two months of transcendent spiritual practice, I decide to flow with the moment and surrender to whatever happened. It was as though the universe had paused to observe my decision and reformed itself around my choice. I pulled out my trusty "Idiots Manual" for VW owners" and just as I sorted out the automotive issue, a young man showed up at my side and asked if he could be of assistance. I humorously replied, "Not unless you are a VW mechanic." To which he replied, "As a matter of fact, I am." I laughed. Not only was he a VW mechanic but he also had the very part I needed to repair the car in his garage. A half-hour later we were on way. As we drove off it dawned on me that it was Labor Day and all the automotive repair places were closed.

Next time: Past-life regression and recollection or maybe dream of the dead.

NDE -- Glimpses of the Other Side

In a previous blog, I discussed some of the ways we learn about the territory of death and after death. The most familiar resource is religion. It is the main purpose of religion to provide a theological framework for why we are here and what it all mean. Invariably religions predict a relationship between behaviors in this life and rewards or punishments in the next. It has been suggested that religious doctrine gives society its moral compass and motivation for being good. Authority for this religious doctrine is almost always attributed to God or some divine being by way of inspiration to a specially chosen prophet (e.g. Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Joseph Smith). Eventually the charismatic teachings of these religious messengers evolve into formulated rules of behavior. Considering the number of wars that are grounded in religious fervor, one might question the underlying definition of "being good," or the calibration of the proffered moral compass. Nevertheless, for many people in the world, religion has been a source of comfort and guidance regarding the mysteries of death.

A more down-to-earth source of information about death comes from the dying themselves. This too I mentioned in the earlier blog. The visions and communications of the dying, termed "nearing death awareness" by Kelley and Callanan in their book Final Gifts, provide a first hand-glimpse of the possibilities of death. Terminally ill patients frequently speak of a journey or trip they are about to take. Some report advanced traveling in the mind or spirit to various places around the world or in otherworldly realms, not unlike fledgling learning how to fly. There are also descriptions of visitations by deceased relative and friend, and if observed in those moments the dying do indeed appear to be looking at something invisible to others. Moments before her death, my friend Marianne, who had been unconscious, suddenly sat up in bed and gazed off into the distance, a look of beatific awe and amazement on her face. It was the sort of look that makes you turn to see what is there, followed by goosebumps upon seeing only the wall. Another friend told me that during her mother's final days she (the mother) seemed to have acquired the skill of astral projection, since she was able to report the details of her children's conversations conducted well out-of-ear-shot. The LA Times article, "Taking Life's Final Exit" provides a lovely summary the Final Gifts book along with other intriguing reports on "nearing death awareness.

A third source of information about death comes from people who have revived after being declared clinically dead. In his seminal book, Life After Life, Raymond Moody's recounts the many common features of "near-death experience" (NDE) -- a long dark tunnel, disembodied observation of one's physical body and the activities around it, a feeling of profound inner peace and contentment, bright golden light, the appearance of deceased friends and relative and/or an otherworldly being to assist in a life review and the subsequent return to the living. Moody's book is largely anecdotal and he makes no claims about proof of an afterlife, but he is clearly impressed by the reports of his subjects and discounts any rational scientific explanation. For a sample of a near-death encounter see Mellen-Thomas story. While not all near-deathers claim the spiritual insights of Mellen-Thomas, almost all report the loss of any fear about death after their experience--a comforting result in and of itself. The two near-deathers I interviewed in the course of making my film series, Secrets of Life and Death, both describe their reluctance and disappointment at returning to the living, so wonderful was their glimpse of the other side.

Those uncomfortable with the implications of NDE have sought physiological and psychological explanations, e.g. drug induced hallucination, brain shutdown, oxygen deprivation, depersonalization and birth memory. Discussion of the scientific viewpoint may be found on HowStuffWorks and Wikipedia. Evidence that favors the survival of consciousness after death is reported by Kenneth Ring in a paper written for the Journal of Near Death Studies and summarized on the NDE website. The jury is still out on where NDE proves or disproves life after death. Read the material and decide for yourself. Ultimately it boils down to what you believe in, and that may have a lot more to do with your own life experiences than any rational argument.

In my next blog I will describe a fourth source of after-death information -- communications from the dead themselves  These communications come to us in three distinct ways: channeled (not so very different from the way religions initially acquire their own death knowledge); electronically or telephonically transmitted -- also known as electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) or Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC); and dream visitations.

If you have any personal experiences or research related to this subject please share with the rest of us.

Dream Guidance

Dreams are an amazing resource if you can learn how to decode them. They can give you information about the purpose of your life, the state of your health, the people you have lost or the progress of your work. They can even hint at  what you should do or not do. But, how to make sense of them? So many wild visuals: water, zebras, butterflies, overflowing toilets, crammed bookshelves, trains, mountain trails, people you feel you know but can’t identify when you wake up. What does it all mean?

Like poetry, dreams are full of symbolism and metaphor. If you give them time and attention you can start to learn the language of your own dreams. The first step is to write them down. Best to do it when you first wake up, because dreams have a habit of slipping away quickly. Some dream enthusiasts will wake up in the middle of the night to record their dreams. Not me, I’m much too attached to my sleep. Also, I read in one of Jeremy Taylor’s books (big dream author) about writing down dreams only to discover in the morning that the writing had been a dream too. So why even try. The way I figure it, if it’s important, I’ll remember.

Expert dreamers have some helpful hints about keeping a dream journal and interpreting dreams. When you are writing down your dream always write it in the present tense as though it were happening in this very moment. This helps to bring the dream into the present and makes it more accessible to the intuitive side of your brain. 

How you feel about the dream and also how you felt just after the dream can be important clues to the dreams meaning. If you felt positive about the dream, what is going right in your life right now? Can you relate it to your dream.  If you felt frightened, or angry or sad, again consider what is happening in your life and see if there's a connection. 

Next, examine everything in your dream: every object, person and action and consider what special meaning each has for you. In my own dreams, buses, trains, cars and bikes regularly appear. They are all forms of locomotion -- ways for me to move forward. I usually associate them with the work I've doing for the last twelve years, making and distributing my film series, Secrets of Life and Death. Train? Moves fast, but not in my power. Bicycle? Slow and easy and under my own steam.

It helps to share your dream with others who are also enthusiastic about dreams. Their interpretations of your dreams and vice versa can provide many new insights, besides making it a lot more fun. The rule about interpreting someone else’s dream, however, is to always preface your interpretation with: “if it were my dream, it would mean. . .” The meaning of your dreams is always up to the dreamer. There is no one right interpretation, only the interpretation that feels right for you. 

Books of symbols can be a good resource for additional ideas. Since I often dream about animals, my favorite book is, Animal Speak by Ted Andrews.

My dreams have given me a lot of insight throughout my film making process. Scanning through a dream journal written in 2006, I happened on a dream titled, “Caught on the last step.” This was a month before I contracted with the editor who helped me finish my films. In the dream my foot is stuck on the last step of a staircase. I have to step backward to move forward again. And that is exactly what I ended up doing in real life. I went back to the editor I had given up on a year ago because she was too busy. The timing was the right and we were able to finish editing the first two films in four months.

So give it a try. Dreaming is one of the great mysteries of existence. It can put magic into your life.

Nonbelief or Disbelief

I want to share this exchange I had with a friend about my last blog post,  Understanding Death for Those Without Faith.  Daniel objected to my use of the word "Atheist" as its true meaning is one who does not believe in a God. One can disbelieve in God and still believe in some form of afterlife. 

I started by asking if there was a more concise term for "a person who does not believe in an afterlife."

Daniel: Good question. Personally I feel that "materialist" covers it, because that seems to be the gist of it -- the notion that all reality, including consciousness, can be reduced to some crudely material basis.  I think that if one firmly believes this, then any experiences or phenomena that seem to challenge it will be interpreted within that framework even if it means sweeping whole chunks of subjective experience or objective evidence under the rug. That seems to be how anomalies in general are handled by our arbiters of reality.

Michelle: Materialist... sounds more like a consumer or someone after worldly things. This may or may not be true for those who believe we cease to exist after death.

Daniel: That's a common usage of the term "materialist," but in philosophy and science it means someone who believes that matter is all there is. The philosophical materialist believes that consciousness arises from physical matter (specifically, brain matter), or at least from the *behavior* of brain matter, i.e., neurological activity.

The nonmaterialist considers that the brain and its activity may modulate, structure or create imprints in consciousness but sees consciousness itself as essentially independent of matter, and capable of being influenced directly by other consciousness.

Theoretically one can argue on behalf of either point of view and invoke supportive evidence, but the materialist overlay on mainstream science is so invisibly pervasive that self-described scientists will generally accept evidence representing only one point of view. In other words, this overlay is often equated with science itself, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. Science is simply a *method of inquiry*. Properly conducted, it should be neutral with regard to particular philosophies, worldviews and subject matter. One might even say that the scientific method is very much a spiritual discipline in that its practice requires setting the ego aside and letting Nature speak without hindrance or prejudice.  (Sure, some distortion is always inevitable -- you just want to minimize it as much as possible.)

Michelle: It may be they have not been exposed to experiences or information that shifts their perspective. Perhaps "nonbeliever" might be more precise. Or "rationalist.

Daniel: I think genuine "nonbelief" is fine because it's neutral and presupposes openmindedness. What I think we're dealing with here is instead DISbelief, which is really just a fixed, unconscious belief in an opposing idea.

Michelle: "I did point out to the participants at the screening that Buddhism is an A-theistic practice.  However, there were at least two people who specifically said they did not believe in an afterlife.  And they are members of a group I truly need to address. They are looking for something.

Daniel: If their disbelief in an afterlife was unshakeable, what do you think they were looking for? For most people with high levels of disbelief, anything that smacks of religion (which would presumably be their only point of reference to an afterlife) is already pretty much off the table.

Michelle:  I think the nonbelievers (disbelievers?) were looking for some way to cope with the fact of their dying, to bring hope back into life when everything seems hopeless.

Some hopeful strategies those who do not believe in an afterlife include: leaving a life legacy for those left behind -- maybe an annotated photo album, an ethical will, videotaped messages to children. Examination of one's life is a good exercise.  Learning to live in the moment, to cherish each moment, to spend time in nature and joy, to feel gratitude, to feel awe.  These are all things available to the nonbeliever. Last, and more difficult for nonbelievers is opening to the mystery of life. And that may a little to close to religion for most.

Daniel: That's a tough one. The materialist/atheist must admit to no mysteries, while believing that science will eventually solve them!

But on the practical, human level, yes. Whatever works to raise the person's spirits and help them open to joy in the moment is a blessing. Philosophy is small comfort unless they've already opened up to interpreting their experiences in a new light and relaxing into them.



Please share your thoughts regarding afterlife. We may be totally off the mark. -- Michelle

Understanding Death For Those Without Faith

A survey of attendees at my last film screening revealed consensus for wanting a deeper understanding of death. While our discussion was amazing in its breadth and coverage of difficult topics such as anger, acceptance, loneliness and the need for help, nothing was said about what happens when you die. No one in the room appeared to have the requisite personal experience.  No near-deathers, no reincarnates, no prophets or seers.

My objective for my workshops is simple-- get people talking about death.  But the survey made me realize that my audience was looking for something more -- specific information about death itself. The traditional place for obtaining an understanding of death is religion. All major world religions have something to say about death whether it flowery fields at the foot of God, the luminous embrace of deceased loved ones, return to the dreamtime, absorption by the mother goddess, or scary visions that send us scurrying back into rebirth for another round. Those with a deep faith may be comforted by the teachings of their chosen path. But this avenue offers little to those who have lost their childhood religious beliefs or never had any to begin with. What can I offer to a person who truly believes at the core of her being that she will cease to exist at the moment of her death? Sixty-two percent of my screening participants either did not report a religious/spiritual identification or said they were Atheist.

In the workshop, I asked people to consider death is an option, a path that might be chosen instead of taking on still more aggressive chemos, more invasive radiation, surgical interventions or high-priced experimental treatments neither tested or approved. My mother had metastatic breast cancer. The surgeons removed 70% of her intestines because it spread there and she could no longer eliminate waste. The surgery gave her about four more months to live. It gave her time to finish up her life. Her oncologist, however, also recommended chemotherapy. I would not have thought her a good candidate. She was extremely underweight, could hardly eat because of a paralysis to the right side of her face and her cancer had spread to her liver. After two treatments, she said "No more." The physical impact was too debilitating, too awful to endure. Physicians will recommend procedures even though the probability of success is miniscule. It is hard to take away hope. Families beg for hope. And well, you never know. Miracles happen. Also, to put it crudely, it's a business model. If a patient never think of death as an option, if he/she never face fears about dying, treatment may continue right up until the very last breath.

Well, why not? If you believe that you cease to exist at the end of that last breath isn't living, even in suffering, preferable to non-existence??? Maybe not. My mother didn't think so. Maybe the atheists at my workshop are not so sure either.  Or maybe they are looking for something else when all hope seems gone.

Besides religion, another way we can learn about dying is from those nearing death. The following list of books look to the experiences of the dying for guidance. Even the confirmed atheist can find something useful here.

• Dying Well, Ira Byock, MD, Berkeley Publishing, Berkeley, 1997 -- Full of heart-opening stories about finishing up relational business, saying good-bye and letting go, this book is primer for dying in peace. His five essential steps are I forgive you; forgive me, thank you, I love you, good-bye.
• Final Gifts, Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, Bantam Books, NY 1992 -- Rich and mysterious stories about the leave-taking process of dying collected over ten years by two hospice nurses. Full of the mystery of this amazing transition.
• The Grace in Dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh, Harper, San Francisco, 1998 -- Pulling together the essence of many world wisdom traditions, (e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, Zen, Native American religions, Sufism, the Kabbalah) and years of working at the bedside of the dying, transpersonal psychologist Singh formulates a sort of Jungian process of psychospiritual  transformation from ego to "Ground of Being." Interesting and heady, the book extracts the best teachings from our religious traditions. But it is not for someone close to death.  For those near death, she says, "...put the book down. And know that you are safe. ... If you are dying, your mind will come to know this soon. So go and rest or go and pray or go and meditate, so that when you begin to enter the realms of the sacred you will resonate with those realms gently."
• Who Dies, Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Doubleday, NY, 1982 -- Pioneers in the conscious dying movement, Stephen and Ondrea share knowledge and insights obtained from years at the Hanuman Foundation Dying Project. Included are wonderful meditations on forgiveness, pain and dying. There is also an amazing description of what dying feels like from the inside -- mentally transmitted to Stephen from one of his patients. I read this book after my parents died and experienced a profound shift in my understanding of illness and healing. 

Ultimately the message in all these books is to embrace the mystery. Life is an amazing experience and so is dying. Welcome everything. 

Growing Old and Liking It.

At my 60th birthday party

Not until I reached forty did I notice any signs of aging.  I had that youthful appearance that had liquor stores and restaurants carding me until well into my 30s. When I reach 40, however, my eyes started to go.  I resisted, as most of us blessed with 20-20 vision resist. I only wore readers at night when reading in bed. I recall sitting in an Indian restaurant with a friend trying to decipher the menu in the mellow glow of the table lamp. Gradually and insidiously the need for glasses spread to all my reading time. Now I wear progressive except when I'm walking outside where the signs are graphic or large enough to read.

What really got my attention regarding my aging was the day I ran down a mountain trail and at the bottom discovered that my knees hurt and the hurt didn't go away for several days. I was stunned. That had never happened before. I had been a long distance runner for fifteen years.  I understood fatigue, cramped muscles, temporary aches from over extension, but this was new phenomenon. This was aging. This meant I had to be more careful. I had to learn to respect my body's limits. The bad news is that with each passing year, new limits keep adding on.

I still look pretty good on the outside. I eat extremely well -- organic, mostly vegetable. I do yoga and walk everyday. I've kept my weight down. My small breasts do not weigh enough to sag. Yet something is going on inside that I have no control over. It is the time clock of my cells.

A delightful and yet disturbing book, The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead, by David Shields, goes into great and at times humorous detail about the process of aging without being tedious or too scientific.

Given a list of 24 words, an average 20-year-old remembers 14 of the words, a 40-year-old remembers 11, a 60-year-old remember 9, and a 70-year-old remembers 7.

After age 30, your digestive tract displays a decrease in the amount of digestive juices. At 20, in other words, your fluids are fleeing, and by 30, you're drying up.

That may account for some of the digestive issues I began to experience in my late 30s which I always blamed on the fasting I did at Sufi camp and the inevitable food bingeing that would ensue afterward. I started taking digestive enzymes in my 40s and never looked back.

Shields' lists of age comparisons are interspersed with anecdote from his own life and that of his father who at the time of the book's creation was 97 and heading for 100.

The maximum rate of your heart can attain is your age subtracted from 220 and therefore falls by one beat every years. Your heart is continually becoming a less efficient pumping machine.

You couldn't prove this decline in efficiency by my dad, who, until his early 90s, would awake in darkness in order to lace up his sneakers and tug on his jogging suit. Birds would be just starting to call; black would still streak the colored-pencil soft blue of the sky; my father would be jogging.

The book is also interspersed with the comments of writers and celebrities and interesting stats:

Lauren Bacall said, "When a woman reaches twenty-six in America, she's on the slide. It's downhill all the way from then on. It doesn't give you a tremendous feeling of confidence and well-being."

Jack London died at 40; Elvis Presley, at 42.

Don Marquis, an American newspaper columnist who died at 59, said, "Forty and Forty-five are bad enough; fifty is simply hell to face; fifteen minutes after that you are sixty; and then in ten minutes more you are eighty-five.

I have to agree with Marquis about the hellishness of the fifties. For most women, that's when menopause sets in.  There is no exaggerating the impact that chemistry shift has on a woman's body.

As women lose estrogen, their pubic hair becomes more sparse, the labia becomes more wrinkled, and the skin surrounding the vulva atrophies. The cell walls of a woman's vagina become weaker and more prone to tearing; the vagina gets drier, more susceptible to infection, and--with loss of elasticity--less able to shrink and expand, less accommodating to the insertion of a penis.

Most women will recall receiving the book, Growing Up and Liking It from their school around the age of 11 or 12. It give graphic details about the physiological changes about to take place as a girl reaches puberty.  I seem to have missed the follow-up publication for young girls turning 50, Growing Old and Liking It. All my knowledge was gleaned from the locker room discussions of older women.

I also agree with Marquis about the speed with which the sixties follows on its heels. Remember those old movies in which passing times was conveyed by the leaves of a calendar falling away? (If you don't remember, you're probably too young to find this post very interesting.)  That is how time feels to me now. Yesterday, it was January 1st and today it's more than half way through the year. Is that because I'm aging or because time is really speeding up?

David Shields begins his book with birth and continues to old age and death.  It is an engaging read with some very usable information. Here's his recipe for living longer:

If you want to live longer, you should--in addition to the obvious: eating less and losing weight--move to the country, not take work home, do what you enjoy and feel good about yourself, get a pet, learn to relax, live in the moment, laugh, listen to music, sleep 6 to 7 hours a night; be bless with long-lived parents and grandparents (35 percent of your longevity is due to genetic factors); be married ....

Read the book if you want to know the rest. It's probably in your library.

If you want to know about death, which Shields doesn't discuss, check out my website or come to one of my film screenings.