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WHY SEARCH FOR BEAUTY AS YOU FACE DEATH?

Once a single mom, with three small children in tow, I went camping in Yosemite National Park in 1963.  Somewhere there I saw a sign that read, “Breathtaking beauty heals.”  Because I was dealing with the recent death of a marriage (divorce), and all the losses and changes that ensue thereafter, I longed for healing – what Webster defines as being “free from grief, troubles, evil, etc.”  And it was, in the space of a few days, that the tremendous beauty of that great natural wonder mended my suffering soul.

The truth is we all face physical death everyday, if not now, then certainly later on.  There’s no denying, not one of us gets out of here alive.  My mentor, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, would six years later, in 1969, write her seminal text on “Death and Dying,” bringing the taboo subject of death and the process of dying out of its closeted, hush-hush status.  The world has been the better for this diminutive physician’s shining a huge spot-light on the natural and universal event that awaits anyone or anything that has ever lived on this planet.  Then in other writings and public lectures, and at her Workshop which I attended in 1985, Elisabeth would often speak of the “little deaths” along the path of every human being, the profound losses and changes we are all too well acquainted with, such as loss of a job or career, losing a home, having to move, natural disasters, etc.

The mission of this web site is to help persons who face deaths of any kind – the big, final physical one, or all the endings along the way – to find beauty as a balm, and an antidote for overwhelming sorrow, grief and suffering.  Beauty can be found in many forms and guises:  the meaning of one’s life, reconciled relationships, pleasurable pursuits, and heightened awareness of the details of daily life.  It is the search for beauty that heals as one stares down any form or aspect of death, loss or change!

Nine months before Elisabeth Kubler-Ross died in 2004, I called her to ask permission to use one of her quotes in a book I was then writing.  It reads:

“Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms, you would never see the beauty of their carvings.”

 “Oh, yes, that’s my favorite one.  Use it with my blessing,” she said.  That was the last time we spoke.

Poet Elsie Robinson identifies “Beauty As A Shield,” a protection.  In the first two stanzas of her poem, Robinson enumerates all the remembered sights that comfort her, things like “Sprawled golden hills, with shadows like spilled wine,” or “The dawning wonder in a baby’s face.”  Then she concludes her final stanza:

“When my heart faints I will remember sights like these,

Holding their beauty as a shield against despair:

For if I can see glory such as this

With my dim eyes, my undeveloped brain,

And if from other darkened, selfish lives

Such flashes of brave loveliness can come,

Then surely there is something more than this

Sad maze of pain, bewilderment and fear—

And if there’s something, I can still hope on."

DEDICATION

We dedicate this web site to the life and memory of our precious friend and the uncle of three of our children, DONALD W. MOORE.  It was our great privilege to be part of the team that cared for Don in his final months.  He was known as the “Desert Naturalist,” held high national ranking as a chemist, and was a dedicated environmentalist who inspired many young people over the fifty years he lived in his beloved desert.  What he wanted most in life was “to be useful.”  Inspired by him, we hope this web site proves “useful” in the fullest measure.

                                                                                       Clifford Allen and Laura June Kenny

OTHER VOICES:

“There is so much work to be done on changing our view of death.  To associate death with beauty in its deepest sense is powerful because it completely reverses the contemporary image of death.”  Betty J. Kovacs, Ph.D., author of The Miracle of Death

See www.kamlak.com for what Betty terms, “A larger worldview in which birth and death are experienced as events in Life.”

“One day in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”

                                                                                                           Sigmund Freud

“It is too bad you want to be someone else.  You don’t see your own face, your own beauty.  Yet, no face is more beautiful than yours.”         

                                                                                                             Rumi

“Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.”

                                                                                                      Abraham Lincoln

“I strove with none; for none was worth my strife.  Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art!  I warmed both hands before the fires of life;  It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

                                                                                                       Walter Savage Landor                  

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ABOUT OUR HONORING PRIVACY IN OUR ESSAYS

Some of the essays you will read at this site will be general observations about the awareness of beauty and the process of dying.  Other essays will recount experiences Cliff and Laura June have encountered during their many years as hospice volunteers.

Names and locations have always been altered to protect the privacy of the individuals and their families that we were privileged to serve as the end of life neared and death occurred.  Forever we shall owe a debt of gratitude to these dear people for allowing us to be taught by them, for we remember what Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote us in a July 1993 letter: “Know that all dying patients are the best teachers in the world.  You have experienced it yourself and you can pass it on to others so they don’t shy away from the needy and the dying because it is really an incredible growth experience.”