from
Living Our Dying:
A Way to the Sacred in Everyday Life
by Joseph Sharp
Hyperion
Death comes with a lot of extra baggage in our culture, dark images and
symbols that energize our deepest fears. Sometimes that baggage can be so
overwhelming that we actually miss being alive with the person who is
dying.
We can become so swept away by our fears that we're not present at all.
Instead, we are elsewhere in our mind, reacting and relating from a place
behind impenetrable walls, a place of seeming safety and protection from
death's dark power.
These walls appear in many different forms. One of the most common
disguises itself as “spirituality.” Resting in our spiritual certainty, we
may feel
protected from the almost unbearable pain of watching someone we love die.
Another wall disguises itself as “being tough” or “holding it all
together.”
Another wall is blatant denial, like “When you get out of the hospital…”
another
calls itself “work.” Of course there are all the drugs: alcohol, pot,
sedatives,
Prozac, television, caffeine, you name it. Usually we mix and match our
walls.
Have you ever gone to the hospital to see someone who might be dying and
spent much of the time staring up at the television set, watching a soap
opera
you've never seen before, talking only during the commercial breaks about
the
most recent developments on CNN? Perhaps this is an extreme example, but
then again…
In working with dying we must come to recognize our walls for what they
are, and not dismiss them as mere moments of awkwardness or discomfort.
We must be willing to courageously push through. Recognizing our walls for
what they are is the first, necessary step toward being alive with someone
as
they are dying. And make no mistake, there are prison walls. They keep us
locked within ourselves, separated from one another, our world, and God.
Nakedness
What can we really offer someone who is deep into the process of dying?
What can we offer—not as healthcare workers, husbands, wives, or lovers,
parents or children—what can we offer as fellow human beings on a journey
of
awakening, as fellow soul-travelers temporarily occupying these bodies
while
going through our own living/dying processes? What can we do from this
larger
place in our being?
After sincerely working with this question for some time in both clinical
and
personal situations, the best answer I've come to is something I heard
from
concious-dying advocate Ram Dass: All I can really do is create a
spacious
environment within my own mind that allows someone else to die as he or
she
needs to die. This is an act of consciously stepping back and
listening.
How
else can I truly honor and learn from the person dying? When I feel myself
wanting to control the process, change it, heal it or whatever, I try to
become
conscious of my assertions and watch my own control issues at work. The
real
gift I can give is to be authentically present and nonmanipulative.
This may seem confusing in light of the focus in pastoral care to “elicit
the
emotional process.” Though I have made some very directive moves with
people when working from a pastoral-care or therapeutic model, eliciting
the
emotional process is usually not my focus with someone who is in the last
stages of the dying process. Still, there are no hard-and-fast rules. I've
found if
I elicit with an attitude of questioning and exploration, I am generally
on safe
ground. It's when I think I know just “where” the dying person needs to go
next
along his or her emotional and spiritual journey that I get lost in the
forest of
ego games.
And, of course, even the best pastoral-care model has its limitations too.
Finally, we each have to go beyond our models and just sit naked with
someone who is dying. If we're naked enough, the dying person's nakedness
will touch ours and we'll both return to the Garden of Eden—connecting
with
each other in a space that's pure and open and real. Often the dying
person
will be in that space already, especially as he nears the moment of death.
As
Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement, wrote, “The dying
have shed the masks and superficialities of everyday living and they are
all the
more open and sensitive because of this. They see through all unreality. I
remember one man saying, ‘No, no reading, I only want what is in your mind
and in your heart.'” It is our job to be receptive to what the dying
person
wants to
share: his depth or his denial. I've found that by creating a spacious
environment within my mind that allows another person to die as he or she
needs to, I open myself for the naked contact.
This is the prime directive for death-and-dying work with another person:
I
have no right to say how anyone should die. If he wants to be in
denial,
so be
it. If she wants to be angry, so be it. It is my lesson to keep my heart
open and
seek a higher truth within myself, but not to enforce an outward
determination
of what I think that truth should look like for someone else.
And, yes, strangers are easier. Of course, the more we know and love
someone, the harder it is to keep this attitude of nonattachment and
openness.
Nevertheless, that is the lesson before us, the work we have to do. Go as
far
as you can and when you can't go any farther, that's okay too. You are on
a
journey and are learning along every step of the way.
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