LIFE WILL SEND US LITTLE DEATHS –HOW DO WE GREET THEM?
You lose your job, or you are transferred to a distant city and your family has to move. A marriage that you established with such hopes begins to break apart and cannot be mended; separation and divorce follow. Recession makes deep inroads into your finances and you lose the home in which you have invested so much of your resources. You are not granted the scholarship or fellowship for which you longed and planned. A friendship or relationship upon which you counted turns cold, and there is an empty place in your heart. These finalities are but samples of the sad endings to certain chapters of our lives. They are “the little deaths,” with which we all must learn to cope. They form preludes to the major physical deaths of friends, lovers, family members we shall all experience. And, quietly in the background of our own individual life, “the little deaths” portend our own certain and inevitable bodily demise. How then do we greet these harbingers of death?
Probably we enter into those mental defense structures or stages that Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross so effectively delineated in her seminal work, ON DEATH AND DYING. We must be careful, in naming them, not to make them sequential, like a certain pathway of stepping-stones that must be taken when we begin to cope with profound loss and its natural consequence, -- ensuing grief. The stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It helps, when life throws us a curve, to be able to identify and name the feelings welling up in us. Thus we can get a “handle” on what we are experiencing, and the passage through that experience is less treacherous for our mental equilibrium.
A case in point: last September for several days we visited our mentally handicapped daughter in upstate New York where she lives in a great supportive group-home. Some years previously, she had visited our home once a month when we lived in Canada just fifty miles from her residence. Always the visits went well. We anticipated much the same kind of experience. But this time, we found her a bit more “set in her ways,” and she found it difficult to spend the nights with us in a motel. After a few hours of sleep, she would awaken and be unable to sleep, and neither would the either one of us who tried to comfort her. She has many physical handicaps, as well, and her health status, as a result, has become more fragile. Reluctantly, on the last day we were with her, we told her housemother, “Never again can we expect her to spend the nights with us in a motel on our visits to the East.” That meant I wouldn’t be able to cook for her if we were to rent an “efficiency.” The crushing of that hope was “a little death.” I was able to name that loss, comprehend the feelings of depression that swept over me in the wake of that realization, and then move into acceptance of the reality we confronted. Now we have refashioned our hope where our daughter is concerned. Thus we plan to visit her in New York very soon this summer and we shall do great things together during daytime visits. As author and lecturer Harry van Bommel says, “Hope is ever present when we make our expectations fit the circumstances.”
Confronting either “the little deaths,” or the finality of death that will overtake each of us one day, we face always the loss of definite hopes. When we lose a position, an opportunity, a house we loved, a friendship, a relationship, we lose all the hopes we had invested in those major structures that landscape our lives. We hear those suffering these losses expressing themselves as follows: “I will never see us grow old together;” “We won’t ever know what she would have been like as an adult;” “We planned to live here till we died;” “I was counting on this job to help put my kids through college,” etc., etc. Honesty, as always, is the best policy when facing our losses. Acknowledging the pain and grief the loss has caused, allowing oneself to sit momentarily in the presence of the devastation one feels, truly and fully experiencing it, then moving on, -- this process will prevent one from becoming “stuck” in denial and from repressing genuine emotions.
One of these emotions may well be anger. We should not be surprised that profound disappointment and loss induce anger – the urge to strike out and hurt as we have been hurt. Could we look beneath anger, we would most likely find a gaping wound of the heart, a brokenness of spirit. We call it hurt. Understanding the natural reaction of anger in ourselves, we are not as likely to be stuck in anger, blaming ourselves or others for the profound predicament in which we find ourselves. We won’t have to hear ourselves saying things like, “If only he hadn’t smoked all those years;” “Those stupid doctors – why didn’t they diagnose the cancer earlier;” “If I had a better upbringing, I wouldn’t have taken that job, or married that woman.”
Neither should we spend much time at “the bargaining table,” where we make promises to ourselves or to others or to God that “Things will change. You wait and see. I’ll lose weight and find the right partner. -- The next job won’t find me slacking off. I’ll give it the effort it deserves. -- Surely we can find a house where we don’t have ‘to keep up with the Joneses,’” Suffering happens, as the Buddhists say, and no amount of bargaining with it will make it disappear from the human condition. So why waste time and effort trying to contend with the inevitable, and promising what we can likely never deliver? Certainly we can make better choices in every situation, but the range of choices may be limited.
The deep prolonged sadness that loss provokes is characteristic of depression, a state of mind where it appears we have lost hope. We look at our situation and call it “hopeless.” But as long as there is life and breath, there is cause for hope, no matter what we are facing. What we need to do is to recast or rephrase our hopefulness. Blind and deaf, the indomitable Helen Keller could say something like, “When one door closes, always another door opens.” So we acknowledge our shortcomings and ineptitude, that not all alternatives are open to us. And we choose to look for those doors that are open to us.
Thus we may never sing opera or dance ballet or write “the great American novel.” Instead we shall probably sing to our children, dance or snorkel with our spouse, and write loving letters to our family and friends. I may never have that extraordinary job I always dreamed of, but I can do an ordinary job extraordinarily well. And when our own particular end time comes, we can say with a sense of peacefulness and grace, “There is no cure for this disease I have, but I know I will have the care and concern of my family and of Hospice, and I shall live fully until I die.” This blessed state of acceptance is what John Cardinal Newman termed, “Peace at the last.”
We had a dear friend in Canada, who was re-diagnosed with cancer after18 years of being cancer-free. When we met for lunch and expressed our sorrow at his prognosis, this dear man could tell us, and with a smile, “I am befriending death.” He looked death in the face and did not flinch. He used whatever dimensions of time he had to serve as a chaplain, to travel, and to be with family. Our friend was a man of hope, as epitomized in the words of James Wilkes, M.D.: “Hope is the capacity to redefine our lives in the face of present realities.” And Dr. Wilkes concludes, “We are all dying and the issue is not how much time we have but how we live the time we have.” And our friend truly knew Newman’s promised “Peace at the last.”
Yes, life will present us with many “little deaths.” Each time we greet them unflinchingly, as fearlessly as we are able, -- each time we seek to maintain realistic hope in the face of whatever, we are wisely preparing for “that final exam” we all have to take down the road. Think of the little deaths as “homework,” preparing you to pass the last big test with “flying colors.”
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