Final Reflections

I am struggling with my faith and struggling with anxiety. I am a 22 y/o married woman and I am pretty happy. Since I was around 15 I have been scared to die (I obsess over it) and have terrible anxiety and panic attacks regarding life,sickness and of course death. As a child I went to church ,had complete faith in where I was going when I died and never questioned god. As I am getting older I have so many more questions and don't have faith like a child anymore, I am confused with the meaning of life. I have been to a councellor about my anxiety, but I know the only thing that will help me is prayer and faith in the Lord. If anyone has advice on what I can do to help this fear of death/the unkown I would appreciate it so much.

The death of my mother last month has brought into focus some of your concerns.
Your feelings are real, important, and universal. When I was about your age, I had a strange near death experience that left me with a utter fearlessness of death. (It didn't make me more religious-- just less anxious.) What you would have seen is someone in a pool of blood moving like a half squished beetle. What I felt was a floating sense of warmth, serenity, and calm, a bit like when you can sleep late on a Saturday morning knowing that you don't have a care in this world for the coming day. The jagged edge between extinction and life produces all kinds of emotions, from hysteria to prayer, and I'm sure those emotions were in full force last week when the US Airways jet ditched in the Hudson river last week.

In thinking about my mother's death, I've come to a few conclusions, for what they are worth, about dying, death, and grief. First, there is nothing romantic or wonderful about dying. It's an ugly, grotesque process-- an ambush-- a nasty deal-- and strangely a mirror of birth with its humilations, sights, sounds, and smells. It is never fair and there are always loose ends. There aren’t always times to say good by. Unlike the movies, it is unlikely that you wil hear any last parting profound words. What I heard was almost too painful to recall-- barely audible grunts.

We are all looking into our grave. As Ryan White, the teenager who died of AIDs, said, “We are all dying.” In a movie, two honeymooners are standing at the rail of an ocean liner. “If I were to die tomorrow, the young women says to her husband, “I would feel that my life had been full because I have known your love.” They kiss and then move away revealing the name of the ship on the life preserver: Titanic. In my mother's case, she died of voluntary starvation in accordance with the terms of her living will, and yet, during the week or so that she lived, still retained some consciousness. It was hard for me to accept that, and as much as I honored my mother's desires, I resolved that should that ever happen to me, I want to be unconscious from the moment the living will is activated until my death.

At present US mortality rates, 25 percent of Americans die before they reach 65. The one certitude that theists and atheists accept is physical death. Man, as Shakespeare said, is the “quintessence of dust” and “men must endure their going forth even as their coming.” You are but 22 years of age, and your entire life stretches in front of you. Whether you are a theist or an atheist, it seems to me we can all agree that we can make the life we have matter by living as fully as we can each day that we have.

The question is whether death is extinction and annihilation of all that I am. Is death a pilgrimage or a destination? “Now I am about to take my last voyage—a great leap in the dark,” said the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. What will happen to you die? Nothing, the materialist says. What will it matter if famine unchain their wrath again you, while you lie comfortable in your grave consumed by honest worms, neither dreaming nor snoring. No regrets will linger in your tomb to mingle with the larvae that batten your melting flesh.

For the Christian, it is the death of the soul, not physical death that is our enemy. “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so.” John Donne wrote. “On short sleep past, we wake eternally/And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!” To pass from life to death is not such a terrible thing. The experiment has been made countless times. We are all aware of the transitional nature of life and fame, that the seasons of life pass us by as relentlessly as autumn to winter.

Death, for all its ugliness, gives nobility and poignancy to life. When I look at a gravestone or a coffin, I sometimes think that “Therefore but for the grace of God, goes a better man than I.” Death bids us to slow down and wake up. A cabdriver pointed out to me it was a beautiful day, and indeed it was. I just hadn’t noticed it. I complain when it’s too hot or too cold, and don’t notice it when everything is perfect. For all of us, someday the electroencelogram’s sine will flatten. As the Tibetan author Sogyal Rinpoche says, “If you’re having problems with a friend, pretend he’s dying—you may even love him.” The columnist Joseph Sobran wrote that “When I consider that I am going to die someday, a thought that occurs to me more often now, I feel a sad affection for people who otherwise irritate me. I begin to appreciate them and to think of what I have in common with them. Sharp differences soften. Maybe we should begin our farewells a little earlier than we usually do.” H.L. Mencken, was perhaps unwittingly pious when he noted that “If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have a thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”

The one thing my mother would not want me to be is to be morbid and gloomy, and she would want me and my kids to enjoy all that life as to offer-- dinners and concerts and fun with the children. And that is exactly how I plan to honor her.

To life!

We Are Born To Die

Father Richard John Neuhaus, the editor in chief of First Things, authored the following reflections on dying and death eight years ago. Today, he is facing his own death. Here are some excerpts.

We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word "good" should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.

Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.
Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die every day, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take." Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.

The worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak. Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter. There are pills we can take to get through the experience, but the danger is that we then do not go through the experience but around it. Traditions of wisdom encourage us to stay with death a while. Among observant Jews, for instance, those closest to the deceased observe shiva for seven days following the death. During shiva one does not work, bathe, put on shoes, engage in intercourse, read Torah, or have his hair cut. The mourners are to behave as though they themselves had died. The first response to death is to give inconsolable grief its due. Such grief is assimilated during the seven days of shiva, and then tempered by a month of more moderate mourning. After a year all mourning is set aside, except for the praying of kaddish, the prayer for the dead, on the anniversary of the death.

In The Blood of the Lamb, Peter de Vries calls us to "the recognition of how long, how very long, is the mourners’ bench upon which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship-all of us, brief links ourselves, in the eternal pity." From the pity we may hope that wisdom has been distilled, a wisdom from which we can benefit when we take our place on the mourners’ bench. Philosophy means the love of wisdom, and so some may look to philosophers in their time of loss and aloneness. George Santayana wrote, "A good way of testing the caliber of a philosophy is to ask what it thinks of death." What does it tell us that modern philosophy has had relatively little to say about death? Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent." There is undoubtedly wisdom in such reticence that stands in refreshing contrast to a popular culture sated by therapeutic chatter. But those who sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship, cannot help but ask and wonder.

All philosophy begins in wonder, said the ancients. With exceptions, contemporary philosophy stops at wonder. We are told: don’t ask, don’t wonder, about what you cannot know for sure. But the most important things of everyday life we cannot know for sure. We cannot know them beyond all possibility of their turning out to be false. We order our loves and loyalties, we invest our years with meaning and our death with hope, not knowing for sure, beyond all reasonable doubt, whether we might not have gotten it wrong. What we need is a philosophy that enables us to speak truly, if not clearly, a wisdom that does not eliminate but comprehends our doubt.

There is nothing that remarkable in my story, except that we are all unique in our living and dying. Early on in my illness a friend gave me John Donne’s wondrous Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. The Devotions were written a year after Donne had almost died, and then lingered for months by death’s door. He writes, "Though I may have seniors, others may be elder than I, yet I have proceeded apace in a good university, and gone a great way in a little time, by the furtherance of a vehement fever." So I too have been to a good university, and what I have learned, what I have learned most importantly, is that, in living and in dying, everything is ready now.

From Father Neuhaus's final entry in "The Public Square" in the new (February 2009) issue of First Things that reached my mailbox on Friday, the day after his death.

As of this writing, I am contending with a cancer, presently of unknown origin.... I am grateful beyond measure for your prayers storming the gates of heaven. Be assured that I neither fear to die nor refuse tolive. If it is to die, all that has been is but a slight intimation of what is to be. If it is to live, there is much that I hope to do in th einterim.... Who knew that at this point in life I would be understanding, as if for the first time, the words of Paul, "When I am weak, then I am strong"? This is not a farewell. Please God, we will be pondering together the follies and splendors of the Church and the world for years to come. But maybe not. In any event, when there is an unidentified agent in your body aggressively attacking the good things your body is intended to do, it does concentrate the mind. The entirety of our prayer is "Your will be done"-not as a note of resignation but of desire beyond expression. To that end, I commend myself to your intercession, and that of all the saints and angels who accompany us each step through time toward home.

Death of a Christian

From Execution Eve, by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Charles Pinckney Luckey of the Middlebury, Conn., Congregational Church was making his usual ministerial rounds, as usual on his motorcycle. Suddenly, rounding a corner, he lost his balance and fell.

He arrived home that mid-October day in 1974, a little bedraggled. But this didn't matter much-- he was always a conspicuously informal dresser, though never affectedly so. In fact, there was no trace of affection in him, which is one reason he was so greatly, and quietly, popular with his congregation.

What vexed Luckey was that he-- a perfect physical specimen at 50, tall and rangy and handsome, with the face of a 30-year-old and the physique of a long-distance runner-- should have lost his balance. So he went to a doctor, suspecting that he had something wrong with his ear canal. The doctor examined him, couldn't find anything, and everyone hoped that whatever it was would go away.

It didn't. Luckey began to lose his vision and, in a few weeks, was losing the motor control on his left side. By December, he was blind. A legion of specialists surveyed his wilting frame, and a name was spoken which squirts ice water among even hardened doctors. It was diagnosed as Jakob-Creutzfeldt disease, and there are few recorded cases of it. Something about a galloping degeneration of the nerve cells. The prognosis for him: up to six months. Cause? Nobody knows.

They took Charles Luckey to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York to "confirm" the diagnosis. It was only there that he yielded to depression, when they poked about and asked him questions, to measure, scientifically, the physical and intellectual deterioration. Before and after the poking, he was obstinately cheerful and affectionate, dictating to his secretary farewell letters to his friends, letters exalted by a curious dignity that had attached to him even as a teen-ager. Then, on the Sunday before Christmas, propped up at the lectern by his 17-year-old son, he preached his last sermon to a congregation racked with pain and admiration.

The crisis came shortly after. He called his secretary and dictated a letter which he sent to a few friends, and which was pronounced by the retired, aged chaplain of Yale University "the most moving credo of the Christian faith written in my lifetime."

"What"-- Charlie dictated-- "does the Christian do when he stands over the abyss of his own death and the doctors have told him that disease is ravaging his brain and that his whole personality may be warped, twisted, changed? Then does the Christian have any right to self-destruction, especially when he knows that the changed personality may bring out some horrible beast in himself? Well, after 48 hours of self-searching and study, it comes to me that ultimately and finally the Christian has to always view lifer as a gift from God, and every precious moment of life was not earned but was given by grace, lovingly bestowed upon him by his Creator, and it is not his to pick up and smash."

And so I find the position of suicide untenable, not because I lack the courage to blow out my brains, but rather because of my deep, abiding faith in the Creator who put the brains there in the first place. And now the result is that I lie here blind on my bed and trust in the sustaining, loving power of that great Creator who knew and loved me before I was fashioned in my mother's womb. But I do not think it is wrong to pray for an early release from this diseased, ravaged carcass.

"Lovingly given," he closed the statement, diffidently, "to my congregation and to my friends if it seems in good taste."

It seems to me in very good taste, and I pass it along, with the word that at least that final prayer was answered. The coma began two weeks later, and on January 20, 1975, he died. There had been no personality change. That, all the dreadful powers of Jakob-Creutzfeldt couldn't do to Charles P. Luckey.

A Christian View of Death

John Donne writes

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so
One short sleep past, we wake eternaly,
And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.

For the Christian physical death isn't a dread enemy. The death that Christians hold in dread is not the death of the body but the death of the soul.

I came across a letter my parents wrote in 1980. "In our last prayer letter, mention was made f the fact that Harold's sister Elsie and sister-in-law Irene were both in critical health condition. We must now report with sadness that Irene passed away January 1st and Elsie on January 4th. We are reminded that the Lord gives to each of us our appointed time and tasks and that while life is short and fleeting for all it is yet long enough to be significant, especially when lived out in the will of God."

Airline pilots have a catch-phrase where weather conditions are optimum- CUVU-- ceiling unlimited, visibility unlimited-- and that is the hope that God gives us. "Even there shall thy hand lead," says Psalms 139:10. Discovery of God's steadying hand begets quiteness and confidence for the road ahead. In the economy of God, we are needed. We can lend our strength to "whatever things are true. . . honorable . . . lovely . . . gracious . . . excellent. There is pain in the loss of those we have loved, but such persons we honor not by retiring from life but by carrying on with courage, faith, and hope.

Remind me, God, when I am lonely and perhaps I feel despair
Let not my ailing heart forget that you hear every prayer
Remind me that no matter what I do or fail to do
There is still hope for me as long as I have faith in You
Let not my eyes be blinded by some folly I commit
But help me to regret my wrongs
Inspire me to put my fears upon a hidden shelf
And in the future never to be sorry for myself
Give me the restful sleep I need before another dawn
And bless me in the morning with the courage to go on.

NDEs

I found this site of people who have died and came back to tell about their experience. Here is one short example

" I was watching the paramedics perform CPR on me when my glowing companion suggested I might like to go back. I asked her where I would be going back to. With that, two other beings arrived, my grandmothers, one I had never met and one who passed into spirit only 18 months previously. I knew instinctively that I would be safe whatever choice I made. I was surrounded by love. I was encompassed by warmth and a sense of belonging I've never experienced since." Leonie, age 5.

other stories at www.nderf.org/NDERF_NDEs.htm

I was wondering what you all thought of experiences like this that people tell and whether or not you thought they were valid? Does it increase your faith or make no difference to you that so many have these types of experiences?

I've had only one such experience about two decades ago, although it's unclear how close I was to death. I lost consciousness at the health club and banged my head on the floor. What people saw was somebody who moved like a half crushed beetle in a puddle of blood. What I felt was the way I feel on a Saturday morning after a long, peaceful sleep-- a feeling of deep, soft comfort and well-being. I'm sure there were neurological and physiological defense processes at work. Nevertheless, this strange episode left me with a fearlessness of death as well as a hightened awareness of the now.