Authors: John Robbins
The boy ended his letter by saying, “I don’t know if you can tell by this picture, but she is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I hope I someday have a wife as pretty as her.”
Curious, the company president asked to see the photograph that had accompanied the letter. His secretary handed it to him. It showed a smiling woman whose sparse gray hair was pulled back in a bun. She was well along in years, her face bore many wrinkles, and she was sitting in a wheelchair. Yet her eyes were luminous with kindness and joy.
5
What really matters isn’t whether you color your hair or get Botox injections. What matters is that you greet the experiences of your life, including the signs of your aging, with love and acceptance rather than disdain. Every life stage has its unique gifts and powers. What’s most important is that your inner beauty shine through your life.
It is no indictment of healthful paths that they lead, as all paths eventually do, to the moment that you pass from this world. Life choices that can help your days be full of accomplishment, peace, and satisfaction are no small achievement. A way of life that lengthens your years, helps mobilize your inner resources, adds to your feelings of well-being and comfort, and enables the power of your spirit to illumine your days is a great blessing.
In the world’s healthiest cultures, old age is not seen as a curse, and death is not seen as an enemy. Rather, the entire arc of the human condition is seen as an ever-changing series of opportunities for growth, fulfillment, and love. When people die, their whole community comes together in celebration of the continually changing nature of life.
These cultures understand and accept the entire life cycle. Death is real and close, and people have continual opportunities to remember the transiency of life. Rituals honoring those who have previously passed on are woven into the daily life of the community.
In the modern West, on the other hand, we are conditioned not only to deny death but to view it as a failure. Even though most of us want to die at home, not in a hospital, and want to die naturally, not hooked up to life support, in the end very few of us get what we want.
What one 78-year-old man experienced in a Western hospital is all too common. After he witnessed the intubation and unsuccessful attempted resuscitation of a fellow patient, he begged to be left alone. “Listen, doctor,” he implored his physician, “I don’t want to die with tubes sticking out all over me. I don’t want that my children should remember their father that way. All my life I tried to be a mensch, you understand?…Rich I wasn’t, but I managed to put my sons through college. I wanted to be able to hold my head up, to have dignity, even though I didn’t have much money and didn’t speak good English. Now I’m dying. Okay. I’m not complaining, I’m old and tired and have seen enough of life, believe me. But I still want to be a man, not a vegetable that someone comes and waters every day—not like him.”
Although this man was a competent adult and made his wishes clear, they were not honored. He was “coded,” tagged by hospital personnel to be resuscitated at all costs. Eventually, he managed to disconnect himself from the machinery, leaving a handwritten note to his physician: “Death is not the enemy, Doctor. Inhumanity is.”
6
It’s now been forty years since the birth of the hospice movement, with its emphasis on helping people die with dignity and peace, often in the comfort of their homes. But in Western medicine, the end of life remains hypermedicalized. When someone approaches death, we still typically fight it every step of the way.
Some of us have a particularly hard time accepting death. Immediately after U.S. baseball star and national icon Ted Williams died in 2002, his spinal cord was severed and his head was separated from his body. Then both his head and body were coated in a glycerin-based solution, placed in a pool of liquid nitrogen, brought to a temperature of minus 206.5 degrees Centigrade, and stored in this cryogenically frozen state. This procedure, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, was done at the behest of Williams’s son, who wanted to believe that his father might someday, when medical science had become far more advanced, be brought back to life.
Most of us find that our difficulties with accepting death take less dramatic forms, but for all of us, facing death can be very hard. “Even the wise fear death,” said the Buddha. “Life clings to life.” There may be some of us who have overcome this fear, but most of us are afraid of dying. There is no shame in this, for it is part of our nature. We all experience the desire to push death away, to pretend life will go on forever. But still, every day on earth, hundreds of thousands of people die.
This rhythm is as steady as a heartbeat, continuing unabated day and night, winter and summer, everywhere that human beings live. Stephen Levine, who has spent decades counseling the terminally ill, reminds us that some people die from starvation while others die from overeating. Some die of thirst, others by drowning. Some die while still children. Others die of old age. Some people die in confusion, suffering from a life that remains to some degree unlived, from a death they cannot accept. Others die in surrender with their minds open and their hearts at peace.
7
We often make an artificial distinction between “the dying,” by which we mean those who have some idea of the limit that has been placed on their lives, and the rest of us, who have no idea how much time we have left. Thinking this way enables us to avoid thinking about our own dying. If we think about dying people as a separate group, we can imagine that we are not dying. We can pretend that it isn’t happening to us. But every day that passes brings us steadily
closer to our death. It is happening to each of us, and it is happening to everyone we know and everyone we love.
There is a story in the Buddhist tradition of a woman whose only son dies. Consumed with grief, she carries the body of her dead child from house to house, asking for medicine to cure him. Some people react with pity, others shun her, but all sense that the pain of losing her son has been too much for her and has driven her insane. Eventually, the woman goes to the Buddha and cries out, “Lord, give me the medicine that will bring back my son!”
Buddha answers, “I will help you. But first please bring me a handful of mustard seeds.” The mother is overjoyed, and says she will do so immediately, when the Buddha adds, “But each mustard seed must come from a home which has not known death, from a house where no one has lost a child, a husband, a parent, or a friend.”
The mother again goes from house to house in the village, asking for mustard seeds. Everyone is eager to provide the seeds, but when she asks, “Did a son or daughter, a father or mother, die in your family?” they answer her, “Alas, yes,” and tell her of the loved ones they have lost. She searches for days, but can find no house in which some beloved person has not died.
Finally, the woman finds herself on a roadside, feeling weary and hopeless. She watches the lights of the town as they flicker and then are extinguished at the end of the day. At last the darkness of the night reigns everywhere, and she sits contemplating the immutable fate of humanity.
When she returns to the Buddha, he says to her: “The life of mortals in this world is troubled and brief and combined with pain. For there is not any means by which those who have been born can avoid dying.” Allowing her pain now to be what it is, the mother buries her son in the forest. No longer denying the truth, she vows to devote the remainder of her life to the nurturance of compassion and wisdom in the world.
When Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., was director of the pediatric inpatient division at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, she heard angry voices coming from inside her office as she arrived for work one day. Several of the staff nurses and resident doctors had gathered there and were very upset. Apparently, someone had told a five-year-old boy who was in the end stages of leukemia that he was going home that day. He had told a nurse to pack his things, pointing with excitement to his tiny suitcase in the closet. “I’m going home today,” he had told her. Remen describes the scene:
The nurse was horrified. Who could have promised this terribly sick little boy that he could go home when he had no platelets or white cells? When everyone knew he was so fragile he could bleed to death from the slightest injury? She asked the other nurses on her shift and the previous shift if they had told the child he might go home. No one had said a word to him.
The outraged nurses then accused the young doctors. The doctors were incensed at the suggestion that it was one of them who had callously promised such an impossible thing. The discussion had grown more heated and was moved to the privacy of my office. “Could he go home by ambulance, just for an hour?” they asked me, unwilling to disappoint him and destroy his hopes. It seemed too dangerous. “Did anybody ask him who told him he could go home?” I said. Of course, no one had wanted to talk to him about that.…
A few hours later the child said he was tired. He lay down, pulling his sheet over his head, and quietly slipped away. The staff took his death hard. He was a love of a little boy and they had cared for him for a long time. Yet many told me privately how relieved they were that he had died before he had discovered that someone had lied to him and he couldn’t go home.
8
Conditioned to think of death as the enemy, members of the hospital staff did not consider that the child might actually have been profoundly attuned, sensing that he was, indeed, “going home” that day.
Our society has taught us to fear death, but there are other possible ways to look at it. “Death is not extinguishing the light,” wrote the Indian poet and visionary Rabindranath Tagore. “It is putting out the lamp because dawn has come.”
Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese poet and philosopher, was long known and beloved for his work by millions of Arabic-speaking people. In the last twenty years of his life, Gibran lived in the United States and began to write in English. In his book
The Prophet
, he wrote,
AWAKENINGFor what is it to die
,
but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing
,
but to free the breath from its restless tides
,
that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed
sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then shall you begin
to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly
dance.
9
Our culture’s attitude, in which death is seen as a failure, either of the doctor or the patient, is at odds with that of almost every traditional culture. But it has insinuated itself deeply into all of us. Could it be the denial of death in our culture that underlies our fear of aging and our lack of respect for the elderly?
How would our lives be different if we could realize that tomorrow isn’t promised to anyone? How would our lives change if we understood that time is only lent to us, that our days are but a trust handed into our temporary keeping?
If we were to grasp fully that someday we too shall die, would it help us to answer the poet Mary Oliver’s question, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
It has been said that there are two very important days in each human life. One is the day we are born. The other is the day we know
why we were born. I have known many people who have never experienced that second day, who have never understood the purpose of their lives, and so have come to their deaths not knowing whether they have really lived. The Methodist bishop Gerald Kennedy once described the most tragic kind of funeral service a minister is called upon to conduct:
It is not the kind that would seem obviously to be tragic. It is not the service for a youth whose life has been snuffed out before he has even reached maturity, nor is it for the infant who never gets a chance at living. Rather, it is for those who have never learned to live, who come to their final hours with no friends and have contributed nothing with the time and talents entrusted to them.
10
Similarly, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, “The worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am 75 and yet not ever truly have lived.” Though Dr. King was assassinated at the age of only thirty-nine, he knew one of the great secrets of the human experience: It doesn’t really matter much at what age you pass from this world. The quality of a human life cannot be measured in years. What really matters is how much love, wisdom, and courage you have brought to the life you were given.
Finding the fountain of youth is not about living forever. It’s about allowing your life to be guided by the beauty of your soul. It’s about finding the fountain of joy and the fountain of life. It’s about living so fully that you know you have really lived. It’s about loving so fully that you know you have really loved.
May you find the fountain of youth, not as an exotic place somewhere hidden and remote, but within yourself, as the very way you walk through life. May your sorrow as well as your joy be a doorway into your greater heart. May you find your way through the fathomless mystery of your life to the source of all that is good and true.
When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. May you live so that when you die, the world will cry and you will rejoice.
Talk about what matters to you. Even if your voice trembles, speak the truth as you see it.
Laugh often. Cry when needed. Be humbled by the vastness of the universe.
Celebrate transitions. Create rituals to affirm how you want to experience and enjoy each new stage of your life. Celebrate the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes. Notice the special gifts and beauties each season brings. Take pleasure in small things. Defy the myth that more is always better. Rejoice in the power of humility. Remember that small is beautiful.
Know how much is enough. Honor the yearning for a slower pace of life with more time for joyful relationships, fulfilling work, and living your dreams. Live simply so that others may simply live. Give away everything that is cluttering your life. Have nothing in your house that is not useful or beautiful.
Always remember that it is the small, simple things you do every day that bring light to this world.