On Death and Dying
O Lover,
I still recall the gist of musings long ago by a colleague of mine in the context of a graduate student palaver: “I am more at peace with the certainty of my own death than I am with the actual process of dying.” That death/dying distinction remains instructive for me today although particulars have now largely displaced abstractions.
First the givenness of bodily death, what I might dub the última. From my origins to a point well past midlife I traveled with various dimensions of uneasiness regarding my own mortality: fear (as in “fearful”) of You and of condemnation early on; feelings of unworthiness; angst regarding Your perceived absence; ambivalence as to the possibility of extinction of personal identity; later, distress regarding the prospects of “Your reigning on earth” (Mt 6:10) even as we humans were rendering that planet uninhabitable. The above notwithstanding, in more recent years I find myself being drawn into the truth that all of this uneasiness can be, indeed is, held within the loving embrace of You who unfailingly are Love Itself. I presume it to be Your gift that in this my December I do not so often “rage, rage, against the dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas).
While these última fears have waned, they have not disappeared. Although my celebration of death itself as Your gift—e.g., Francis of Assisi’s Canticle rhapsodizing “Sister Death”—remains tepid, the prayer I repeatedly offer (fíat volúntas túa [“Do with me as You will”]) is my declaration to You and to myself in the face of the unavoidability of death. It is only Your reception of this my surrender that allows me to join Julian most of the time in declaring that “all shall be well.” I am being shown that being drawn into You is all I need or want regarding my última fears. Tu sólus.
But then there is the actual process of dying, what I might call the penúltima. My family medical history had me long expecting a dying both early and sudden. What has actually happened is that I am now in my 86th year and the dying process has proven to be both protracted and proliferated. Indeed, my anecdotage is a dying by a thousand cuts, as if multiple aspects of body, mind and spirit conspired to cross a threshold into accelerated atrophic particulars and universal entropy. A partial sampler of my octogenarian penultimacy might include the following: diminishing bodily strength, wariness of falling, responsibility for shepherding nearly twenty medications, creeping medicalization of my consciousness, ambivalence regarding my (now) irrevocable dalliance with both Big Pharma and the bureaucratic health industry, tendencies toward isolation and reclusiveness, and the limitations of all contingency plans.
In short, I confess to You that the contents of my dying sampler get far more attention these years than does the inevitability of bodily death; too often do I live less than fully amid my dying. While now I can warily fraternize with Sister Death, I am more often preoccupied with monitoring my decline lest the timeline be inadvertently or carelessly shortened. There is a real danger that the protraction of dying will merely create additional time for more protraction of dying. The musings of these two paragraphs are surely evidence that here again I flirt with preferring a world as it might be rather than that is, and that I need to surrender much further to You in this my final season.
O Lover, You who tirelessly embrace my reluctance to accept fully my being a finite and mortal creature (última), strip down further my cluttered core and amid the aggregate of this my season of dying (penúltima) draw me more fully into Your Divine Life. I long to sing Your song more lustily and groundedly in this “strange land” (Ps 137:4) of preparation for the transformation more fully into You.
