Unitarian Universalist Meeting of
“Living with Dying”
Grace
Note: “Live in the Face of Dying”
Rev. Kathy Duhon
Live in the Face of Dying
Some time back, I collected a
number of related sayings which I put into a folder that I called “Live in the
Face of Dying”. They are similar and
probably at least some of them are based on others of them, and some may not be
attributed to the right person.
Benjamin Franklin said, “Work
as if you were to live a hundred years.
Pray as if you were to die tomorrow.”
Mohandas Gandhi said, “Live as
though you will die tomorrow, but learn as though you will live forever.”
James Dean said, “Dream as
though you’ll live forever, live as though you’ll die tomorrow.”
Very similarly, Theophastus, a disciple of Aristotle, said, “Dream as
though you will live forever, live as if you’ll die
today.” Today. The rest of them ask you to imagine dying
tomorrow as an incentive, but Theophastus, who may
have been the originator in this set of quotes, wanted us to imagine dying
today, and then not letting it stop us from dreaming forever.
Kazantzakis
has his character, Zorba the Greek, talk to an old
man who is planting trees, and who says, “I live as though I would never die”,
while Zorba replies, “And me, I live as though I
might die tomorrow.”
In another vein, Henry David
Thoreau is supposed to have said, “Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody is watching.”
Mark Twain said something very
similar, which makes you wonder if he copied Henry or if he said it and not
Henry. “Dance like nobody’s watching;
Love like you’ve never been hurt. Sing
like nobody’s listening; Live like it’s heaven on
earth.” Twain doesn’t talk about
working, but he adds the idea of living like it’s heaven on earth, like you’ve
already died and gone to paradise.
This brings us to one that is
on our mantle, with no attribution. It’s
a little plaque I got for Jon when I was on sabbatical that says, “Dance Like There’s Nobody Watching”.
All of these are
paradoxical. Someone is always watching
and listening. We are never going to
live forever, no matter how much we dream, work, learn. We live, not usually considering whether we
might die tomorrow, or today, but that is always a possibility. If we live in the face of dying, then the
world opens up to us, mysteriously, so that we can dance and sing and plant
trees and dream the forever of our lives.
Living with Dying
Woody Allen once said, “I am not afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” He also said, “I don’t want to attain immortality through my work. I want to attain immortality by not dying.”
We’re not usually too comfortable thinking about our own impending death, and we certainly don’t want to think about our loved ones dying. When they do die, our first reaction is denial – it cannot be possible. Our minds and our spirits refuse to comprehend this degree of separation, of death from life, as we felt 2 weeks ago when Brian’s sister died in an accident. For many of us this past week, the incomprehensible was the accidental death of our town’s kindly, beloved, children’s doctor, Dr. Denny Tresp. How could that loving and lovable man be dead? No, we’re not comfortable with death and dying, but we need to find a way to live with it, to bring our consciousness to the issues of death and dying for our lives.
In the ancient Celtic tradition of Samhain (sow-een) at this time of year, the dying time of the old year, the harvest and decaying season of nature, the Celts marked an annual reminder about death. They believed that the veil which separates the living and the dead was especially thin now, and that we could be in more contact with those on the other side, which was somewhat frightening. And so developed bonfires and masks and costuming, and all those customs were adopted into the festivities of All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween. The Christians incorporated the native holiday, acknowledging that it is good to notice death and the dead we grieve, altogether, as a community. So they added on All Saints Day and All Souls Day. Other cultures, especially Spanish-speaking peoples, developed the Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos, traditions in which remembrances of the dead were made in family and village settings. A day or two or three being set aside to notice our relationship to death and dying is a sacred time, and is good for us.
When I trained for hospice, a very simple point was driven home to us. We were not working with “the dying”. That would set up a false dichotomy between “we living” and “you dying”. No one can foretell the future, after all, and any of us hospice volunteers could have died before our clients. What we learned was that we were working with people who were living, and who had a somewhat more clear idea of when they would die than most, but they were as living as any of us. Also, we are all in the process of dying. Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which we can die. And we are all only temporarily healthy.
After we can at least acknowledge that we’re all living and we’re all dying, what else can we say about dying to understand it better?
UU minister Victoria Safford wrote what she called a “Credo For Now”. In it, she declared, “…it might be wise simply to imitate the creative impulse of the cosmos, to join with it, to act like stars, which live and shine for no other purpose than to explode and die, contributing their energy to some larger, timeless process. … I believe that the suffering and death of living things is part of a grand and natural cycle, tragic only because we alone among the animals are so aware of mortality and time. Death is not a part of happiness at all, but it makes clear the urgency of joy.”
The urgency of joy. If we are all dying, we had better live well and fully, for nothing is more urgent than to love and to be joyful, here and now, as if we were to die tomorrow, or even today.
Occasionally I have had the great
privilege of speaking with someone who has come quite close to death, or is in
the process of dying. Emil told me that
he had been “nose to nose with God”, and then, since he’d been an atheist for
most of his adult life, he corrected himself the next time I saw him, and said
he’d been “nose to nose with mortality”.
He was not afraid. He was
incredibly appreciative of everything, of his wife, even of his nose to nose
experience.
I
remember visiting Ted not long before he died.
He had beautiful, gentle humor and a deep love of his fading life. Candy died just before Halloween, many years
ago, but her lung cancer meant that she had been preparing for years. She was ready. Candy would have agreed heartily with Pope
John the 23rd, when he said, “I have my bags packed – I am ready to
go.” Candy was my teacher, my “Tuesdays
with Morrie” kind of a friend, who seemed on a higher
plane spiritually.
I visited someone in the hospital
who had brain surgery, and he was nicer than I ever remember him being before. I had the unholy thought, “Your brain surgery
agrees with you.” (Kept it to myself.) Sometimes, those who are dying, or who come
close to death, exude such grace and peace – why?
Philip Simmons wrote, when he was
dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, “To accept death is to
live with a profound sense of freedom.
Freedom, first, from attachment to things that don’t really matter: fame, possessions, and even, finally, our own
bodies. Acceptance brings the freedom to
live fully in the present. The freedom, finally, to act according to our highest nature.
“For only when we accept our present
condition can we set aside fear and discover the love and compassion that are
our highest human endowments. And only
then can we deal justly with those about us, for only then are we free to act
according to what is highest in us. And
in such action we find peace.”
What
if we could be truthful and open enough to live with our own dying, to accept
death, before we have a terminal disease or a health crisis that brings us nose
to nose with our own mortality? Or with God? What if
we live in the face of dying? We would certainly
then know the Way of Joy. We would be
living a life in the spirit, centered, loving ourselves and others, answering
life with our best, letting go, surrendering to the mystery, and filled with
wonder and awe. Living with dying helps
us to walk the path of well-being – may all walk it well. Amen.