Death is the father is all life and beauty. While most people fear the process of aging with its projected fear of indignity, it is the process of dying with its projected years of extreme dependency and excruciating pain that looms as the final obstacle to meaningful living. For those who have seriously avoided facing life, facing death comes as a cruel execution. For those who have found a sense of self and integrity with who one is and what one has done, facing death comes as a calm experience to be met and mastered as have previous experiences.  I have no terror of death. It is the coming of death that terrifies me. Regardless of the contrast between those who flee from life and those who face life, dying is not a casual experience nor is death an ordinary event. Drying confronts us with the issue of the means of living—maintaining a sense of dignity. Death faces us with the issue of the meaning of life—finding purpose in the presence of the unknown. Both confront us with intensification of human pain. Let us endeavor to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

How hard is it that we have to die—a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live. In the midst of our everyday routine, this intensification can easily be ignored. This morning my heart was beating so fast, I thought it was a muscle spasm. I said to myself, I hope I am not about to have a heart attack and stayed in bed and closed my eyes until it slowed down again, then thanked God. Every day, I am so thankful to wake up because death’s monstrous wins seem to wheel in the laden air around me. This experience is a reminder that no one, at any time, can avoid that fact of death, and that most of us, at some time, will experience the process of dying.  What is it like How does it feel? What fears, needs, fantasies do you have? What kind of things are we doing that are helpful? What kinds of things do we do that are detrimental? No matter where it comes or how it comes, death is everyone’s burden. One minute a person is alive, they next they are dead. All dying is not the same. Dying can be sudden and unexpected. A plane crashed. A car goes out of control. A sniper’s bullet finds its mark. A split second covers the transition from being alive to being dead. Ask no questions that may lead to deceitful answers.

Pity is for the living; envy is for the dead. Death can be anxiously anticipated and desperately fought. A soldier is ordered into battle. A patient is informed of the presence of a malignant and untreatable cancer. Ah, if he could only die temporarily! An intensely constricted span of time bridges the transition from being alive to being dead. Did we sit down to number the calamities of this World, we should change one idea of evil, and learn to look at death as a friend. It seems like there is a lot of evil in this World, and there is no reason for it.  Sometimes, however, death can be slow and drawn out. A patient with a degenerative disease attends to every little sign of the progressive loss of life. Antiquated age eats away at the vital forces until one remains but a pale and fragile caricature of what one had been. A spaced-out wasteland connects the fertileness of being alive with the aridness of being dead. Death finally arrives as a relief from the relentless erosion of that which matters. No great mistake, whether acted or endured, in our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of death, render it impossible. 

There is much to be learned from the dead, more than you may learn from the living. Just as all dying is not the same, so all death is not the same. Differences among the former are reciprocal to contrasts among the latter. When dying is sudden, death is tragic. When dying is excruciating, death is relief. When dying is quiet, death is consummation.  I have long been in the tomb of my youth. And more has died out of me, already, than remains for the last death to finish. Is a life of dying worth living o’er again? There are a few who have died—technically—and returned to live another period.