Spiritual Practices for a World Falling Apart — 05: Making Peace with the Prospect of One’s Death
I have a vivid memory from when I was seven or eight years old being acutely aware that every second, minute, hour was leading inexorably to the moment I would die, and after that, nothing. It was an uncomfortable feeling that receded into subconsciousness until the memory of feeling emerged as I write. However, the defining moment in my life in relation to facing the prospect of my own death happened in the fall of 1972 in the central police station jail in Kampala, Uganda. A long story, perhaps for another time; for now I’ll just say I was there for no rational reason, a quirk of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was perhaps the sixth day of my incarceration when I realized how lucky I was that I had been arrested by Uganda’s civil police rather than Idi Amin’s security forces. Milton Obote, the former president of Uganda who was ousted by Amin, launched an attack from Tanzania in the hope of regaining power. I became aware something was amiss in the middle of the night when the jail filled up with white men and women, including diplomatic personnel, who had been rounded up from the streets by security forces. Somehow during the chaos the ensued the next day as embassies sought to get their citizens released I got my hands on a newspaper that had made its way into the jail. Obote’s invasion had been quickly quashed and on the front page were pictures of the bodies of the insurgents stacked in piles. This was not death is some far off place, these deaths were real to me and I found myself face-to-face with the real prospect of my own death.
Making Peace with Death. As it turned out, I got out of Uganda alive. I had faced the immediate possibility of my own death and made peace with the fear of death. It was a subtle internal change that meant that the idea of death and dying no longer triggered feelings of discomfort. Making peace with the inevitability of death doesn’t require the kind of experience I had in Uganda. Medium authors Ryan Frawley (Why You Should Think About Death Five Times a Day) and Melody Wilding (To Live a Better Life, Think About Death) cite research showing the psychological benefits of contemplating death. Natalie Holmes writes beautifully about how a solo experience in nature helped her come to terms with the prospect of death — and this moment of mass extinction, and Lannie Rose writes thought-provokingly about her personal plan for dealing with the climate crisis: I am going to die.
May We Have Good Deaths on a Good Day to Die. Meier et al. (2017) found little agreement in a review of the medical literature on what is required for a good death or successful dying. The authors identified ten core themes: 1) preferences for a specific dying process, 2) pain-free status, 3) emotional well-being, 4) religiosity/spiritualty, 5) life completion, 6) dignity, 7) family, 8) quality of life, 9) treatment preferences, and 10) relationship with health care providers, the first three most commonly identified across the thirty-six studies reviewed.
Having a father and mother who died good deaths makes it easier for me to aspire to having a good death myself. My father had an exceptionally active and productive life through his early 80s, and his frustration when he found himself wheelchair bound and in pain was hard to see. My mother and I were with him during for the visit to the oncologist who told him that cancer, which was initially not considered to be life-threatening, was terminal. He gave a sigh of relief. Now there was a good reason he wasn’t able to be productive in the way he had been accustomed most of his life. Yet his creativity never diminished. In the last year of his life he wrote 17 sonnets on aging, sickness and dying. This sonnet captures the attitude that allowed him to have a good death:
In looking at the characteristics of a good death, most applied to my father. He had good hospice care at home, a deep spirituality, and my mother was at his side when he took his last breath. She said that as his other organs were shutting down, his heart beat strongly to the end and his last words were I love the world.
My mother lived another seventeen years, and also had a good death. To say it was a good death is not the same as saying it was easy. She never stopped missing my father and lived with depression even as her engagement in making the world a better place inspired others. She did not intend, or wish, to live a couple weeks short of 90 years. Nevertheless, I titled the last chapter of the selections I made from her unpublished journals, Graceful Exit with Alzheimer's, 2005–2010 without hesitation. Here is a collage she made toward the end of her time with Alzheimer’s:
And here we are together some four months before she died peacefully in bed:
Chief Dan George immortalized the phrase a good day to die as Chief Old Lodge Skins in the movie Little Big Man. For most of us, as with Chief Old Lodge Skins who twice proclaimed it a good day to die and found that it wasn’t the appointed day, we don’t know the time or date we will die. There are exceptions — executions on death row, taking one’s own life in a mindful and intentional way, physician-assisted death of terminally ill patients. When I consider death-by-schedule many more questions than answers come to mind.
The idea of a good death becomes problematic when I consider death by war, mass shootings, famine, accidents, cold for lack of a warm place to stay, extreme heat, flooding, fires. As I observe the state of the world it seems that most deaths are not good deaths. However, for those who live through such events, there is always the possibility of good coming from actions to avoid, reduce, mitigate a reoccurrence.
At a personal level I take measures to reduce the risk of my own death when they are available, such as sheltering in a safe place in our house when tornadoes have been sighted in the area. Beyond that, I accept that there are far more ways that I might die than I can imagine, and having made peace with death I don’t worry about them.
Death of a Yellowwood: A Parable. The Yellowwood Tree is one of the rarest trees in eastern North America with smooth gray bark and fragrant white flowers. The area of our homestead in eastern Monroe County, and Brown County to the east, support the only native stands of Yellowwood in Indiana. Some years ago I had occasion to visit Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia and was astonished to find several large Yellowwood trees heavily laden with seed pods, far east of its natural range. I found that the Quaker botanist William Bartram (1739–1823) had planted the trees using seeds he had received from the French Botanist André Michaux (1746–1802) which came from the holotype tree in Kentucky that Michaux used to name the species. These trees were first generation descendants of the “original” Yellowwood tree. With great anticipation I carried seedpods back to Indiana, stratified them in our refrigerator, nurtured the one seedling that sprouted and planted it in our yard. It grew to become a strapping sapling, and when is started blooming I planted several more Yellowwoods nearby that came from a nearby native plants nursery. I loved that tree, and looked forward to the time when I could harvest viable seed for a fourth generation. Several years ago, for no obvious reason, the tree died. I’ve left its skeleton standing as a reminder that I don’t know what the future will bring until it happens, and that my own good health as I write is no guarantee of longevity. Whenever and wherever my appointed time comes, it will be a good day to die.
A list of articles in this series can be found at the end of:
Introducing Spiritual Practices for a World Falling Apart, June 24, 2022
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