Earlier this month the seminar/screening of my film, Caring for Dying was cancelled because there were an insufficient number of preregistrations. It was scheduled for Saturday morning, April 4th, a day both mild and sunny with flowers bursting out from the recent rains. The beckoning of my garden and the park was irresistible. One could hardly blame people for not coming to an event focused on death. It seemed out-of-season.
I have found, by contrast, that October-November is an ideal time to contemplate mortality -- with its fallen leave, yellow grasses, Halloween and El Dia de la Muerte (the day of the dead). You can almost feel the veil thinning between the worlds of here and there. So I often schedule my film screenings around that time. But I know that, in reality, the "season for death" is an illusion. Death takes us, our friends and our relatives at any time regardless of the weather outside. I experienced this first hand one lovely morning last May when a phone call stopped me in my tracks with the news that my brother, barely 51, had died suddenly in his sleep. Heart attack? Sleep apnea? We never found out. I admit, it was very difficult to take in as I strolled among the song birds and daffodils trying to decide what to do.
I read somewhere that Hare Krisna devotees chant "hare krishna" over and over so that when death comes, they will die with the name of God on their lips. It is taught in the Hindu tradition, that dying with God’s name on your lips is a way of consciously returning to the source. Stephen Levine explains in his book Who Dies, that American Indians learn a death chant during a rite-of-passage vision-quest to be used during times of danger and illness. Death is met with power and clarity, not weakness and despair. In our western culture, death is often perceived as downer, a conversation stopper. And when we do consider death it is in that dutiful, teeth-clenching way of alleviating the burden to our families with our long-term care policies, DPAs, and living trust. Don’t get me wrong, I approve of such pre-planning. But besides making the process of death go more smoothly there is another reason to consider the subject -- it can make for a better life.
Whoa, you say, how can contemplating anything as depressing as death make my life better? As Frank Ostaseski says in the film Caring for Dying, “Being with dying, is the most life affirming thing that I know how to do. It shows me what’s really important in my life. And I tend not to waste so much time now.” When a close friend died this past December, my husband and I spent four days clearing out her tiny apartment and another three clearing out her two and a half storage lockers. The accumulation of a lifetime scattered to the four winds. After finishing with her lockers we immediately started on our own closets, not because we wanted to spare someone else the burden, but because in the face of death, well, a lot of our stuff lost its meaning. We’re still sorting it out.
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