A deathbed is such a special and sacred place: a deathbed is more like an altar than a bed. It is an altar where the flesh and blood of a life is transformed into eternal spirit. Rather than being unsure, anxious and bungling, we should endeavour to be present there with the most contemplative, priestly grace. Regardless of the shock and pain of our grief, our whole attention should be dedicated to the one who is setting off on their solitary journey. We will have plenty of time later to engage our own grief. Now we need to provide the best shelter, the sweetest love, the most sensitive listening and the most wholesome words for the one who is dying. This is the most significant time, the last moments of time on earth. Therefore, it is vital to attend and listen. Perhaps there are last things a person wishes to say, things from long-forgotten past times he always wished to say but never could. Before the great silence falls, he might desperately need to tell something. And there may be things that need to be heard. Perhaps someone around that deathbed has waited all their life to hear something vitally healing and encouraging and perhaps these are the hours in which it might be heard.
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HEN
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EPARTURE
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ECOMES
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RANSFORMING
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RESENCE
Death . . . the undiscover’d country.
SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
I AM NOT SUGGESTING THAT THE DEATHBED BE CONVERTED INTO a clinical monastic cell. Indeed the situation around a deathbed can often be raw and wholesome with surrealistic splashes of black humour. In and through all of this, however, it is vital to provide an atmosphere whereby the deeper levels of what is happening can emerge and be engaged. A deathbed is not a dead place; it can be a place of intense energy. A woman told me recently that holding her father-in-law in her arms as he slipped into eternity was an incredibly transformative experience for her, more transforming in fact than the birth of her two children. She felt privileged and honoured to be with him at his end.
When the activity of departure becomes a liturgy of real presence, amazing things can happen around a deathbed. I have seen reconciliation happen here that no-one could have predicted that anyone would ever have been able to effect. I have seen frozen years of silent cohabitation, where nothing was shared or said, break like a shell and the essence and warmth of two hearts embrace before the final silence. It is amazing so near the bleak frontier to see how words can become jewelled. Words that come alive here often go on to accompany lives with shelter and grace. For the person who is dying, wholesome words can be an enormous encouragement and shelter. As we have seen, it is a privilege to be present when someone embarks upon the journey into the silence. If you attend reverently and listen tenderly, you will be given the words that are needed. It is as if these words make a raft to carry the person over to the further shore. We should not allow ourselves to settle for being awkward and unsure around a deathbed. There is vital and beautiful work to be done there. When you realize that the dying person needs and depends on your words and presence, it takes the focus off your limitation and frees you to become a creative companion on that new journey. One of the most beautiful gifts you could ever give is the gift of helping someone to die with dignity, graciousness and serenity.
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EATH AS
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OUL
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Therefore, be cheer’d;
Make not your thoughts your prisons.
SHAKESPEARE
WE AVOID THINKING ABOUT DEATH BECAUSE IT MAKES US AFRAID. There is no-one to intercede with, no-one that could call off your death. When we view death in a purely physical way, it is that frightening ending where a life is stopped and cut off. However, it is possible to see death in a different and more creative way. To view death as an abrupt, dumb stop is unfair to the beauty, struggle and growth of a life. It seems unlikely that life would choose us so carefully, bring us through so much and then simply offload the whole harvest of journey over a cliff. That in one sudden, dead moment all growth, memory and presence cease seems to fall out of rhythm. So much could not have been so carefully built to be simply destroyed in a second. Something more profound and ultimate is happening behind the veil. This idea is expressed well by the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistraclass="underline" ‘No, I don’t believe that I will be lost after death. Why should You have made me fruitful, if I must be emptied and left like the crushed sugarcanes? Why should You spill the light across my forehead and my heart every morning, if You will not come to pick me, as one picks the dark grapes that sweeten in the sun, in the middle of autumn?’
The imagination has an eye for the invisible. And the real event in death takes place in the realm of the invisible. At a deathbed the merely physical eye sees an old man, worn and weary, breathing his last. At a deeper level, however, this death is an event where the inner life of this person is gathering and refining itself to slip through the door of air. No-one dies poor or empty. The subtle harvest of memory collects here: all the days and places of a life, all the faces, the words and thoughts, the images, all the small transfigurations that no-one else noticed, all the losses, the delights, the suffering and the surprises. All the experiences of a life collect together in their final weave. No-one knows how they will die. When the time comes, it would be so consoling to be in the embrace of loved ones. Yet for many people this is not the case; they die alone or are hurled unexpectedly into eternity by accidents, murder or war. One can only hope, despite the awful outer circumstances, that somewhere in the interior, invisible level where the dying happens, serenity and grace prevail.
The soul is the real container of an individual’s life. The eye always assumes that it is the physical body that holds a life. However, rather than the soul being simply a component or presence within the body, the soul surrounds and pervades the body. The body is in the soul. This means that the soul has a different kind of knowing than the mind and its thoughts and feelings. While the knowing of the mind is limited by frontiers, the soul has no frontiers. At death, the mind is up against the last and ultimate frontier. It will attempt to understand and, with dignity and hope, accept what is ending and what is coming. However, the soul knows in a different way. The soul is not afraid. It has no reason to be afraid, for death cannot touch the soul.
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HEN THE
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IVER
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EACHES THE
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LIFF-EDGE
ALL THROUGH YOUR LIFE YOUR SOUL TAKES CARE OF YOU. DESPITE its best brightness, your mind can never illuminate what your life is doing. You are always in a state of knowing, but that knowing, while often lucid and deep, is more often faltering and shadowed. At times you feel immensely present in your life, rooted in what is happening to you, utterly there. At other times you are only vaguely in your life; things are blurred, confusion or distraction owns your days. In such times you remain attached to the earth by only the slightest thread. Yet through all these times, your soul is alive and awakened, gathering, sheltering and guiding your ways and days in the world. In effect, your soul is your secret shelter. Without ever surfacing or becoming explicit, your soul takes care of you. Never once while you are here does your soul lose touch with the eternal. Your soul makes sure that God’s dream for you is always edging towards fulfilment even when at times the opposite seems to be the case. At times of immense suffering or the most ecstatic joy, your life breaks through the shadowing and you come to sense that something else is minding and guiding you. This is the nature of the consolation and infinitely tender embrace your soul always provides for you. If this is true of the flow of your days, how much more tender must that caring be at the time of your death when the river reaches the edge of the cliff?