Embracing death is saying yes to life

Image by Veit Hammer

I’d never thought much about death until I sat in a hospital room watching my father die.

I’d experienced losses before that. My grandparents were all gone, beloved dogs had died and just a year before, my mom’s partner had succumbed to a silent battle with pancreatic cancer.

But I’d never been in the room with death, been pinned to its inevitability, as it seeped, boldly quiet, into every arriving moment.

By the time he entered the hospital for the last time, my dad had been ravaged, as much by illness as misfortune, for more than decade. A car accident that nearly paralyzed him, heart disease, blood clots, depression, esophageal cancer and all the complications of being fitted with a prosthetic esophagus — they had all taken their toll.

So when I got the call that he was once again in the hospital, this time with internal bleeding and a grim prognosis, I hopped a plane from Philadelphia to St. Lucia, where he lived. And for four days I sat by his bedside, as his vitality leaked out of him and he drifted further away from the valiant optimism he’d once held in seemingly endless supply.

There was no need to talk about what was happening. We — his siblings and a niece were also floating in and out of his room — all knew there was only one outcome. My dad knew it, too. His first words to me when I’d arrived were “I’m on the way out,” which he repeated several times as I fell gently into his open arms and he patted my back, more withered and frail than I’d expected.

The only time death entered our conversation was when he briefly rallied on my second day, insisting he could get better with treatment overseas. My eyes said what my lips couldn’t, as I tried to soften a stark reality: “Dad, you’re dying.” 

Later, I asked if he were afraid to die. The family priest had come, whispered to me it wouldn’t be long. My visits — in a hospital that still limited visiting hours despite my protests — were spent in a tender tangle of touch, murmured words, small devotions, like helping him brush his teeth, sip soup, sending Reiki where he ached.

He wasn’t afraid, he said. This was a marvel and a comfort, a harbinger of how he would leave us on my fourth day there — silently, his eyes fixed on a distance we couldn’t travel, his face illuminated, peaceful, as we sang and prayed and sent him off, festooned in waves of love.

I was shattered. And honestly, almost eight years later, on some days I still am. I have worked through my grief — through therapy, writing, movement, energy healing, the sheer willingness to be present to it.  Yet I know this is a lifetime journey, that integration and healing happen alongside the longing, the missing, the scrape of so many moments when my dad’s absence stuns me anew.

What I never expected was that being with him when he died would gift me with the freedom to embrace my own mortality. To acknowledge that I, too, will die one day and to meet this truth without fear.

We live in a culture that denies this reality. We don’t talk about death, and we certainly don’t plan for it. Yet as we move through this pandemic, death has no doubt been on all of our minds at some point. We read and hear about the grim toll the virus is taking in the news. We either know someone who has a lost a loved one or are personally grieving a loss of our own. (One in eight Americans said they know someone who has died from the novel coronavirus, according to a recent Business Insider poll.)

Death is all around us, yes as the tragic outcome of Covid-19 but also as a natural part of life — the part many of us haven’t been willing to face until now.

Here we sit with the invitation…to explore our feelings, our thoughts, our imaginings, our different perspectives around death. To begin the conversations we may have been putting off or tip-toeing around. To decide what quality of life means for ourselves and to know what it does for those we care about. To create an advance directive or living will, if we haven’t already done so. Because to plan now is to alleviate some of the suffering and the burden that falls to families in the midst of a medical crisis. To plan now is to create peace of mind for the future, knowing your wishes will be respected when your time of death comes — or at least you will have left a road map, given how creative we’ve had to become around our death care and mourning rituals in the age of corona.

But there is more to embracing death than navigating the emotional terrain, as well as the logistics, of who will make financial and medical decisions on your behalf  should you become incapacitated, how you’d like to be memorialized, or what you would like done with your body.

In befriending, or at least coming to terms, with death, we find a deeper courage to live. To love. To give of ourselves in the ways that matter most. Attuned to the fragility of life, we fill our days with the meaningful, waste less time waiting for the perfect moment or day or year to follow each tug of the heart, the longings that speak from our soul.

My journey to becoming a death midwife began during my father’s bedside vigil. I didn’t know it then, but everything I experienced in that room and after he died, as I grieved, in my conversations about death, in noticing the ways we as a society did neither grief nor dying well — it all paved the way to this work.

I’ve not only found a vocation I’m passionate about, I’ve done more living in the eight years since my dad died than ever before. I quit a job that didn’t feed me, left a relationship I’d outgrown and pursued some of my biggest dreams. I’ve learned life’s joys are deeper, sweeter when they bloom from our deepest grief.

We are already being stripped to the bare essentials under quarantine, re-evaluating what matters most and envisioning what we want our life to look like moving forward. Death asks the same of us, instructs, “Go live. Live every bold and urgent breath, every bright strum of your glorious, beating heart.”