A good friend died last month. His death was expected, unlike Evie’s in July which was a horrible shock. She was young and healthy, Michael’s health was failing. He was waiting to qualify for a liver transplant, but his body was too tired and weak to survive the surgery. I was completely in sympathy, I know that I no longer have what it takes to survive and heal from major surgery, or a heart attack or stroke, or a bad accident. There are days, even now when I’m feeling so much better psychologically, when I feel like the chore of getting through the day is too much for me.
For the two years after my breakdown in the fall of 2008, I wanted to die on a regular basis. Sometimes, when the thought went through my mind, I could counter it with “You don’t want to die, you want your life to be easier.” Sometimes I couldn’t even do that. I never considered taking action, I believe in waiting for Spirit to let me know, but if Death appeared in front of me, I’d fall into his arms with relief. Not at THIS moment, when I’m sitting here writing with my dog curled up warm next to me, I have a fire going, I can see the familiar trees and shrubs. If I knew I were going to die tomorrow, would I do anything different? No. Except maybe call all the people who are dear to me to say good bye.
I used to be afraid of death. Especially when I was badly depressed, I would think “I want to die” and then I’d add “I don’t want to die in this depressed state.” I’ve been told a story about an ancestor of mine, Jenny Murdoch, who I like to think of as my mother’s mother’s mother, but it’s too late to find out now. The story is that she was on the boat from Scotland, down in steerage, and there came a big storm. She scrambled up to the deck, crying out “If I must die, let me not die in darkness.” It was told to me with a Scots accent: “If a mus’ dee, let me not dee in darkness.” That’s how I remember it. That cry, in some ways, has been my guiding star: I do not want to die in darkness.
I haven’t been afraid of death since god met me at the gate of heaven with a huge welcome.
Someone who did some work for me, told me the story of his dad, who’d had lung cancer but been in remission. When the cancer recurred, he said he didn’t want any surgery, chemo, etc. In four days he was dead. I think I can also choose to die instead of hanging around for one of those long slowly disintegrating illnesses. I don’t want to do what my parents did, both of them hung on and hung on. They were afraid of death, even though their quality of life had deteriorated.
I do believe, to some extent, that we can choose our time to die. I think of my grandfather, the summer of my sister’s wedding. He was too frail to come to Maine, but my Aunt Carolyn, on her way home to San Francisco, stopped in Cincinnati to see him. She took him a piece of wedding cake. He asked several times if the wedding had happened, and Aunt Carolyn reassured him. The day after she left, he called to the nurse to bring him his glasses. So she did, and he said “Not those, I want my BEST glasses.” She brought him his best glasses, he put them on, took a deep breath, and died. It seemed to me that he knew at some level that the wedding was happening, and if he died before it happened, that would spoil it, so he was hanging on, until he was sure that his death would not disrupt anything. That was just like Gramps, to leave courteously. And I love that he wanted his best glasses. He knew he was facing an extremely important experience, and he wanted to honor it.
By the time my father died, he had been unconscious for a number of days. I had been home for the 4th of July (see monologue). Before I left, he was taken to the hospital. He was supposed to come home after the new treatment, so I had a plane ticket for July 23. By that time it didn’t look as though he would be getting out of the hospital, but I went home anyway. When I got home, mother told me I was the last to know. He’d died while my plane was in the air. It was pretty clear to me that, though unconscious, he somehow knew that help was on the way to my mom and it was OK for him to let go.