Dying to Live

When We Learn All Too Late How to Exist

I was acquainted with death at a very early age. Unfortunately, my biological grandparents starting croaking when I was 5, and they were all extinct before I hit 21. It’s not that they were old. They were in poor health — most of them shriveled up victims of different types of cancers. I sometimes second-guess if they even were real, their former existence now reduced to memories that seem like hazy, manufactured dreams. It didn’t occur to me until later on in life that grandparents are supposed to stick around for a bit. I think there’s a grandparent’s manifesto that goes something like:

1. They’re supposed to be a source of wisdom to seek above mom and dad.
2. They’re supposed to show you that your parents are humans by offering stories of their mistakes.
3. Most importantly, they’re supposed to give you extra ice-cream sandwiches.

Part of a grandparent’s role is to solidify their standing in every kid’s upbringing as the good, spoiling cop to counterbalance parents’ dictatorial fashion of running the family precinct. I got a glimpse of that cherished responsibility, but my grandparents’ collective and premature departure stole part of that experience from me and colored my perception of death.

Victim of Circumstance

As I grew up, I realized that I wasn’t afraid so much of death itself, but I fostered fears of particular circumstances of particular deaths. I understood and accepted that people dying was not a new invention. What I couldn’t get behind was that when and which people die could be a matter of happenstance, and I rejected that. I refused to be a victim of circumstance and die without accomplishing all the grand things I envisioned myself doing. I wanted no part in dying so young like my grandparents did.

Once the reality set in that I really had no control over that (years later), I developed this desire to get closer to death and understand it more healthily. I found myself wanting to get into hospice work. The itch was there for quite some time before I actually started volunteering. Even though the calling rang true to me years before I started, I was a bit afraid to embrace it. I didn’t know if I had the emotional capacity for it or if I would say the wrong thing or, even worse, not know what to say at the right time. Eventually, I pushed myself to do it anyway, and I am now a volunteer for a hospice here in San Diego.

Hospice Work

Not surprisingly, my hospice work has not been what makes people want to tie me down and ask me a million questions. It’s the one thing in my life that actually gets the least amount of prodding from my friends and family. I guess talking about people dying does not radiate the same feel-good-adventurous spirit that’s threaded through my travel stories or being a minority on several counts. When it does get someone’s attention, their response is usually generic: it’s something they could never do. They make a remark along the lines of I’m some extraordinary soul that has so graciously decided to give my time to someone else in need. But the truth of the matter is that I don’t do anything out of the normal. I do what almost all of us do every day.

Hospice work is just being empathetic to someone’s situation, and we do that with our friends and family on a daily basis. The support just happens to come at a time in someone’s life when they’re reminded of their finality. I think that finality — that shared experience of death in humanity— should be carried with us more often than it is. It should not be something we balk at or shy away from. It should be a morsel to digest continually in the back of our minds as we live our lives. Not a morbid fascination with it, but a constant reminder to ourselves that certain people won’t always be around. I think that would make us more prone to cherish the moments we do get to share with them. We forget that often — to cherish a circumstance: a friend, a family member, a job we love, good health, food on the table, shelter, or just having another day to continue. Human beings are extraordinary creatures despite the Alzheimer’s approach we have about our own mortality. We carry on our lives forgetful of our eventual cessation until we’re reminded of it with a death in the family or because of some public atrocity like a school shooting.

Death as a Tool

What I didn’t realize in getting into hospice work is that it’s been less of me helping others and more of my patients helping me. In giving a little of my time every month, I receive so much more. For example, I’ve seen first-hand how everyone approaches death differently. Some people greet it and acquiesce to it with the stoic courage befitting a warrior jumping into battle. Some people shirk from it, refusing to acknowledge its imminence with fear or denial. Some people are humorous, some are obstreperous. Everyone has their own reaction to it, and I think being exposed to how different people have approached death has reformed the way I want to live my life. I believe the two play off one another. How we spend our day to day is how we spend our lives. And how we have spent our lives when we get to the end factors in how we greet death. People don’t like to talk about death because they prefer an arms-length approach to it, acknowledging that it happens to everyone else but them. Hospice has a way of shattering that illusion and has taught me how to embrace death in a way that adds meaning to my life. Steve Jobs said during a graduation commencement speech:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

I think having more of an “openness” to death is a great way to prevent yourself from getting caught up in the bureaucracy of life, shitty friends, jobs that are draining you, or failing to live up to your potential. I want to exit from the world knowing that I did something. However large or small the impact, I want to leave not with the tinsel rewards you get from just going through the motions, but with the spiritual enlightenment of knowing that I lived out the purpose that’s clambering to break free from my soul. You don’t have to be a hospice volunteer to gain an appreciation for life. It helps, but you can teach yourself to have some measure of gratitude for life’s fleeting moments by living in them and doing what you were called to do.