Category: Death

Facing the certainty of death

8/10/2020

A wonderful way to think and pray about the life to which you’ve been entrusted is to face into the certainty of your own death. The only thing uncertain about death is how and when we will die. Death is a part of life by God’s design. By facing into the inevitably of death you will find enormous freedom and clarity in the moments of life which you have now. All of us here may have as much as one more day, or another week, or another month, or year or perhaps many years. We don’t know.   Br. Curtis Almquist, SSJE

    During the pandemic there is no way to avoid thinking about death. We older folk are accustomed to considering how our end will come about and how our last years and days might be. We try to do some planning and do our best to be in control during this life stage.
   But the pandemic shifts everything for us because of its unpredictability and its power. We can choose to protect ourselves by social-distancing and wearing a mask but there are no guarantees. There are medical choices and prayers we can make, but there is no certainty they will work out. Anyone of us may contract Covid-19!
      I choose not to take up a hospital bed although I could end up in one. I ask not to be hooked up to a ventilator, but that could happen.
     I pray that no one in my family feels guilty. I pray that I will remain grateful for all the blessings in my life. Remaining grateful is up to me; a choice I can control.

Life after death

5/2/2020

I posted this on my cottage by the sea blog, but first I want to say more.
     My Christian faith, my belief in ‘life after death’, as the expression goes, gives me enormous comfort. In fact, it makes all the difference. I am grateful that I don’t feel any need to explain this further, either to others or to myself. I thankful for that because, I’d probably start creating/making up all kinds of ways it should be. Ah, how easy it is to play God.

    Up the street from where we live is Wadsworth Cemetery. Lately I’ve been going there after supper, but yesterday it was raining so I postponed by visit until this morning, when I set off at 6:30, coffee in hand.
    I find cemeteries peaceful, calming, and hopeful. If I can embrace that dying is part of living, that death is part of life, I can wander about among the grave stones and feel peaceful; I can breathe in the flowers, flags, sunlight and shadows and feel calm; I can look across the street to a home that was once a stop on the Underground Railroad and feel hopeful.
    COVID-19 is catapulting us to face the death issue, and forcing us to think about our own death and those we know and love, and to consider what the death of the universe as we know it might mean. Visiting cemeteries is one way to bridge the gap between living and dying, and between life and death. It is one way that brings me calm, peace, and hope.

Lethal injection executions; No more of this!

4/26/2017

I’m distressed by the current barrage of lethal injections executions of prisoners in Arkansas. Distressed is too weak a word. As a Christian, I can’t comprehend how anyone can say it is okay to kill someone because they have killed someone else. At least in this situation. “No more of this,” Jesus told his disciples at the moment of his arrest.
Jesus, appearing his history when he did, offered us a new way of being, and thus a new way of acting out in the world. Love God and neighbor. A concise, simple message, although not always simple to follow. I fall short of it all the time in the little things. Granted my life doesn’t offer me times when I have the power to kill or not to kill. That is grace.
To kill or not to kill is a complex issue. What about war? How do I feel about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian in Nazi Germany who joined a group plotting to kill Hitler? What about the right to life advocates? Complex issue. I can understand their points of view. But lethal injection executions of prisoners in U.S. prisons in 2017! I don’t get it. No more of this!

No self-pity allowed~

11/14/2016

     I woke up this morning fretting about my computer problems—due to my ignorance and to Apple. I was into righteous indignation. Then God stepped in, and led me to gratitude and prayer. I recalled a comment my mother made soon after my dad’s death: I need to stop this self-pity and be thankful for all I have and have had. Mom wasn’t denying her feelings, just putting her life in perspective.
     Next I heard God’s call to me to pray for people and reach out to those needing a listening ear. Every day we can hear God speaking; our challenge is to take a moment to stop our worldly chatter, and listen.
     I came home to hear of the death of Gwen Ifill. How to stay in a state of gratitude when it would be so easy to let my sadness slip into inertia?I stopped to listen, and then took a walk to visit my friend Ruth who is in her mid-90s. And now, here I sit at the end of the day, with my computer problems solved, my heart filled with sadness but no self-pity, and a sense of deep gratitude for friends.

Beyond words~

11/13/2015

It has been a week since my last post. So much prayer, so little time to write. I returned from Italy to a weekend celebrating the life of a long time friend who died after a month-long cancer diagnosis.
I am aware that I’m not saying anything new in writing that something so personal brings forth the preciousness, fragility and sanctity of life. The commonness of feelings and how I articulated them, however, doesn’t take away from the profundity of it. When a friend dies, we are conscious that the meaning of these words is beyond any meaning articulated by words. What I know, all I can say is that it is all about God.

Memorial services~for whom?

9/12/2014

For whom are memorial services? I know that’s an awkward sentence, but I trust that you know what I mean. More awkward, however, is the answer to that question. Sometimes we want to respect the wishes of the deceased. I have a friend who, in honoring her mother’s desire, didn’t attend her funeral. And yet, she accepted that we had one at church.

Yesterday I attended a service for Doris at the assisted living facility where she had lived. Many of her friends, who can’t get to the church service on Saturday, wanted to remember Doris and say good-bye. Although we might say that both of these services are for Doris’ friends and family, I believe that she would be pleased as well.

Anne Lamott says it like it is~

8/13/2014

If you haven’t read Anne Lamott’s response to the death of Robin Williams, here it is. She always writes the truth.

This will not be well written or contain any answers or be very charming. I won't be able to proof read it It is about times like today when the abyss is visible and we cannot buy cute area rugs at IKEA to truck out the abyss. Our brother Robin fell into it yesterday. We are all staring at the abyss today.

I called my Jesuit friend the day after the shootings in Newtown, stunned, flat, fixated, scared to death: "Is there any meaning in the deaths of twenty 5 and 6 year old children?"

Tom said, "Not yet."

And there is no meaning in Robin's death, except as it sheds light on our common humanity, as his life did. But I've learned that there can be meaning without things making sense.

Here is what is true: a third of the people you adore and admire in the world and in your families have severe mental illness and/or addiction. I sure do. I have both. And you still love me. You help hold me up. I try to help hold you up. Half of the people I love most have both; and so do most of the artists who have changed and redeemed me, given me life. Most of us are still here, healing slowly and imperfectly. Some days are way too long.

And I hate that, I want to say. I would much prefer that God have a magic wand, and not just a raggedy love army of helpers. Mr. Roger's mother told him when he was a boy, and a tragedy was unfolding that seemed to defy meaning, "Look to the helpers." That is the secret of life, for Robin's family, for you and me.

I knew that those children at Sandy Hook were caught in God's loving maternal arms at the second each crossed over, and the teachers were, too. I believe the shooter was too, another child of God with severe mental illness, because God loves, period. But this is controversial.

I know Robin was caught too, in both the arms of God, and of his mother, Laurie.

I knew them both when I was coming up, in Tiburon. He lived three blocks away on Paradise drive. His family had money; ours didn't. But we were in the same boat--scared, shy, with terrible self esteem and grandiosity. If you have a genetic predisposition towards mental problems and addiction, as Robin and I did, life here feels like you were just left off here one day, with no instruction manual, and no idea of what you were supposed to do; how to fit in; how to find a day's relief from the anxiety, how to keep your beloved alive; how to stay one step ahead of abyss.

We all thought after Newtown that gun control legislation would be passed, but no--not one new law. We think in the aftermath of Robin's death that there will be consciousness raising about mental health, but I doubt it. The shock and awe will pass, like it did after Phillip Seymour Hoffman's death. Unless...unless we take action. But what? I don't have a clue. Well, here's Glenn Close's astonishing organization to raise awareness and diminish the stigma of mental illness, where you can give OR receive help: http://www.bringchange2mind.org/ Go there, OK?

In Newtown, as in all barbarity and suffering, in Robin's death, on Mount Sinjar, in the Ebola towns, the streets of India's ghettos, and our own, we see Christ crucified. I don't mean that in a nice, Christian-y way. I mean that in the most ultimate human and existential way. The temptation is to say, as cute little believers sometimes do, Oh it will all make sense someday. The thing is, it may not. We still sit with scared, dying people; we get the thirsty drinks of water.

This was at theologian Fred Buechner blog today: "It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to keep in constant touch with what is going on in your own life's story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others' lives. If God is present anywhere, it is in those stories that God is present. If God is not present in those stories, then they are scarcely worth telling."

Live stories worth telling! Stop hitting the snooze button. Try not to squander your life on meaningless, multi-tasking bullshit. I would shake you and me but Robin is shaking us now.

Get help. I did. Be a resurrection story, in the wild non-denominational sense. I am.

If you need to stop drinking or drugging, I can tell you this: you will be surrounded by arms of love like you have never, not once, imagined. This help will be available twenty/seven. Can you imagine that in this dark scary screwed up world, that I can promise you this? That we will never be closed, if you need us?

Gravity yanks us down, even a man as stunning in every way as Robin. We need a lot of help getting back up. And even with our battered banged up tool boxes and aching backs, we can help others get up, even when for them to do so seems impossible or at least beyond imagining. Or if it can't be done, we can sit with them on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity. You know how I always say that laughter is carbonated holiness? Well, Robin was the

ultimate proof of that, and bubbles are spirit made visible.

Hope conquers~

2/2/2014

The world weighs heave on my heart these days. No different from the rest of you, but at the same time, so particular. My prayer requests run the gambit, as I’m sure yours do, too. We’re all in this world together.

   I’ve been waking up lately to a pall, a sadness. But then God steps in, which of course is grace, and I start listing gratitudes; and with that, I don’t feel as alone or in such despair. Hope balances the heaviness of the world; no, hope conquers the heaviness. With hope God remains present to me.

      I hate to admit this, but without suffering I wouldn’t know God. Of course, I’d rather skip all of that and just hang out in heaven. I’d rather pass over all that Jesus went through and fast forward to the Ascension. But that’s not the way it works; it is through suffering and death that despair and helplessness lose their sting. That’s just the way it works, the way God works. As the song goes, ‘You can’t have one without the other.’

       With those situations that seem too much to bear, my only hope comes when I remember how Jesus got through it, always starting with gratitude. That’s a good way for me to start, too.

Faith, hope and death~

12/3/2013

On my cottagebythesea.net blog I wrote about ‘the death issue’. I didn’t get into God’s part in all of it because on the blog, which is about silence solitude and simplicity, I try to refrain from expressing my faith. As you know, however, Christianity offers hope as far as death is concerned. Scripture is replete with it; our purpose is God’s kingdom now and forever; God is always with us even in the darkest of times, and until the end of the age.

It’s not easy to hold onto this hope, and all by ourselves, it is impossible. But through prayer, hope is never far away. Death holds no sting. Jesus’ life was about death, but death was not the final word; Resurrection, was.

Peace and quiet and the fog~

12/2/2013

I love the peace and quiet and the fog here at the cottage his morning as I sit here, feeling the pain of so many. A friend's son took his life; another friend's son is in a mental institution so he won't, a young mother I know has died of cancer, leaving a husband and their five year old daughter; a friends infant granddaughter is experience medical complications; and then there are all the issues of poverty, war, the earth. What to do? It’s hard to put this into words, but I feel that my job/calling is to hold (in prayer) the pain for these people and situations.

Mysteriously, all of this is pain is lifting me somewhere else. Closer to God? (I’m not certain if that’s the way to frame it, but it’s the best I can do at the moment.) With this prayer call I’m shifting from a mental ‘I’m sorry’ to a pain, ache, an experience of the heart. Prayer is no longer something I do mentally as much as something I feel compassionately. The sadness is intense, settled in deep in my being, not in my head. Yesterday I had a fear that it would overwhelm me toward depression; today it is settling in as a given for me by God. It’s very personal. Yesterday I wanted to share it with someone, some spiritual director or spiritual friend; today I’m fine sharing it with God (and on this blog).