(Costing no less than everything)
And all shall be well
And all manner of thing shall be well
- C.S. Lewis “Four Quartets”
My life is on its way to simple. Smaller space. Fewer responsibilities. Clearer priorities and less of ‘em. Fewer people in the mix, most of them not insane and, regardless, none of them mine to take care of.
You could say lonely. Some people would. But that’s not how it feels to me. It feels simple.
Which is not even remotely the same thing as easy.
This is something I maybe always knew, in some way (I’m betting you did too), but that really came home to me since working in hospice. I’ll get something said right away: I am not a “good person” or a “saint” for doing this work. I am, in fact, almost embarrassed about how much I love it. I can’t believe I’m allowed to be in the room where someone is dying. For a lot of reasons. But here’s the one I’m going to talk about today…
Because that space is so radiantly, life-changingly simple.
Gruelingly, grindingly, hard, too. Often. Especially in hospice because that is, essentially, a vigil. Long hours. The growing tedium of waiting for something that, when it happens, will be a shattering of everything that has been. And yet even with something so momentous hovering on the horizon, the waiting is unbelievably banal.
People are tired. Dirty. Together. With all that implies. Family tensions don’t magically dissolve in the face of the mortality imperative. Well, almost never. In fact, often, the existing dynamic just rachets up in the face of the utter loss of control that Death is.
When we are in uncharted territory, the familiar is comforting. Even if it’s the familiarity of discord.
And, there’s the other way in which this is hard. As much as we try to make it different, there is often some pain. Sometimes, a lot of pain. There is certainly the body’s struggle to keep doing its job. To keep breathing in and out. To hang on.
How many families have I seen flay themselves with that image, and their belief about what it means re: their loved one’s will to live? If he’s fighting so hard, maybe we’re not doing the right thing? Maybe she’s not ready? Maybe we should revoke (take the patient off hospice service as far as insurance is concerned), tear up the DNR, admit her to a hospital, help him fight…
I’m pretty sure that’s pointless self-flagellation. I don’t see any will to live in those last grasping hours. I see people I believe are ready to die, more often than not. Believe me, not ready looks very different. It’s hard to miss.
I see a mind and heart and spirit that just want to be free, or have already flown. And I see the body just doing its job. Right up until the last minute.
Because that’s simple.
Bodies are simple machines. Complex in form, but simple in function. We’re just circuitry. If you’re ever able to have your hands on someone at that final moment – not so much holding their hand, or resting your fingers on their shoulder, but really laying hands on their body, which I’m not necessarily advocating because it’s not always welcome or appropriate – if you ever have that experience, you’ll feel that death is an electrical event. And I’m not a doctor, and I’m sure I’m oversimplifying this, but that’s not really the point I’m trying to make.
Bodies are simple. Life and death are simple. One is a state, the other an event, but they are basically very simple things. Not much is required to maintain life. And death is just the moment when one or more of those requirements fails.
Minds, however…. Our glorious, baroque, impossible, incorrigible minds flood all the color and the horror into existence. What is beautiful, we make beautiful. What is terrible, we make terrible. What is beautiful to me may well be terrible to you. Nuances and digressions, schisms and meanders. Our own minds are hopelessly complex, half-seen, barely-understood, shadow-filled strangers. Truly impossible, then, to bridge that gap between one slippery, inconstant mind and another. Most of the time.
What can tame the mind – smooth it into a state in which it plays well, however temporarily, with itself and others – is simplicity. Put the mind in a place of one-pointed focus, either through trickery or overwhelm or discipline or terror, and there can be some ease. Not an easy ease. Not always comfortable. But a space. A clarity.
When everything else falls away, what is left is simply what is. And the mind, like an exhausted bird flying endlessly over a flooded landscape, will land in the only place it can and, knowing there is nowhere else to go, or even to plot or consider or plan about going… it rests there.
A condition of complete simplicity, costing no less than everything.
The end of a life is such a condition, at the cost of everything that has gone before it.
The end of a part of a life is such a condition, at the cost of everything that has gone before it.
This part of dying we do all the time. Often enough to have felt the fear, and the loss, and the space, and the rest. To have spun knowingly in this cycle, time and again, is to have the key to overcoming the fear of death.
