by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given March 9, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Let me begin with a story. Ikkyu, a Zen master, was very clever, even as a boy. His teacher had a precious teacup, a rare antique. Ikkyu was drinking from it one day, and he dropped and broke it. Just at that moment, he heard the footsteps of his teacher approaching. Frightened, he held the pieces of the cup behind him. When the master appeared, Ikkyu asked, "Why do people have to die?"

"This is natural," explained the venerable teacher. "Everything has to die and has just so long to live."

Ikkyu produced the shattered cup and said, "It was time for your cup to die."

We all know there will come a time when we will die. That is to say, we know intellectually. But knowing existentially, internalizing that terrible truth is another thing. One day we will not be. At least in our present form. Our bodies, through which everything is mediated, every experience—every taste of food, every sweet smell of spring, everything, even our very reaching out to God—our bodies, through which every thing is known—will be no more? Our self, so identified with the flesh, will be gone. How could that happen? And what does it mean, to be gone?

Every animal thing fears death—that fear is just built in, and it’s a good thing, because it makes us—well, cautious. Our bodies recoil when we sense danger. But humans are the only animal things that are conscious that one day we must die. There’s the rub. So we run and hide from that reality. We deny that death will ever come—for us, at least. It’s like that old country song "Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, But Nobody Wants to Die." And when I think of denial of death, I can’t help but ponder the words of that wise old philosopher Yogi Berra, who said, "If you don’t go to anybody’s funeral, they won’t come to yours."

I was a young adult when death first visited my family, taking my grandfather. I grew up in the home of my grandparents, amidst a large extended family there in North Louisiana: six aunts and uncles and lots of cousins. Now all the elders are gone, with the exception of one aunt by marriage. My generation is next in line, of course. You come to understand that.

We called my grandfather Big Papa, and that name was given for a reason. He was big and judgmental and as a younger man was mean-spirited. He beat all of his children, and they mostly never forgave him. With age, he mellowed a bit. He and my grandmother had been married 67 years at the time he died. This is how I experienced his death.

"The doctors put him in the hospital but couldn’t diagnose anything except just old age, I guess he was 88 at the time, but he was walking real good, going downtown to the courthouse every day to play dominos, walking real good with just his cane about a mile or so and some of that a good uphill slope, until Granny left. It’s hard to say what he died of, except missing Granny. All he did in the hospital was to smoke his Prince Albert tobacco and talk about ‘Mama.’ He called to her in the night the nurses said and made such a fuss that they had to give him medicine to settle him down.

"After school let out, I went right on up to the hospital to see him. He was just filling up his pipe and was sitting up in that white bed, his big nose thinner maybe and maybe a tad pale, but overall looking real good to me for man who was supposed to be that sick.

"‘Hello, Marilyn Jane,’ he said. He did look kind of pale, I thought, as I watched him try to draw fire into his pipe. He just kept scratching, scratching one match after the other and bringing that little yellow flame up to his pipe and then having it go out when he sucked on the stem, over and over again. I was watching and didn’t know what to do to help, so I started feeling nervous and out of sorts I guess because I couldn’t do anything but just sit there and watch those matches go out.

"Finally he put down his pipe to rest a minute, and I saw a red rim around Papa’s blue eyes, something I had never noticed him to have ever in his life before. He just looked right at me and he said, ‘I think I’m going to die, Marilyn Jane.’

"And I took a real deep breath and I thought well of course you are, you’re 88, just look at your thin and wrinkled self and you can see you’re not going to last forever, Papa. But that’s not what I said. I said you look good to me, Papa, I don’t think you’re doing bad at all, why I expected to see you flat out in this bed, not sitting up and smoking this way. Then he asked me where was Mama, and I tried to tell him how it was that she got sick and had to go out to the nursing home on the Minden Road, but he just couldn’t understand, and he stared hard at me and asked when was she coming home, and I knew of course that she wasn’t ever coming home, but I didn’t say that to Papa because I was afraid it would make him not want to live longer, and so I just said I didn’t know.

"But he knew, I think, anyway. He said, ‘I won’t be here much longer.’ I knew he was going to die and I felt pity for him and I was glad I was not that old and not going to die—or if I was I would worry about it when the occasion presented itself, certainly not now. After a few minutes I said goodbye, and you really do look good, and touched his hand, which seemed pretty cold and dry to me, that’s something I never dared to do—touch him, I mean—when I was growing up. And sure enough he was right: I never did see him alive again.

"Big Papa was a Mason, third degree, and I had seen his gold signet ring many times but never knew what the Masons did—they were a secret organization, I guess. One thing they do is all show up at the funerals of other Masons, and so every last one was there when Papa was buried. After the sons and grandsons had lowered Papa’s casket into the ground, the Masons came and stood round the hole and each threw a piece of cedar into the ground on top of Papa and each said in turn, ‘From dust we come, and to dust we shall return.’ Big Papa, who had lorded it over us all, was flat now, and still, and one day, it occurred to me, I would be flat and still, like him.

"When I got home from the burial, I was so hungry that I had to have something right then, so I went right to the fridge and pulled open the door and pulled out the carcass of the chicken that Mamie Endom down the street had brought us. I took it—most of the good part, the breast was gone anyway—and I didn’t care who else might want some I was so hungry I picked it up in my hands and started biting big mouthfuls, and gel and grease started running down my hands and onto my arms, and I just dripped with it but I couldn’t stop, I finished it all, even the soft parts on the back, and the carcass was picked clean before I realized it, and I stopped and put down the cage of bones and looked at my greasy self, my arms, my dress-up dress spotted all over, and I cried, for the first time since Papa died, not because I liked Papa, which I didn’t, but because he was gone, and I started to know that I loved him then, which is a strange way to start loving somebody, just when he’s dead, but that’s the way it happened for me. You can’t help loving what you get used to."

Pretty much everything is wrong with this picture. Dying in the hospital, when he might have died at home. Being separated from his wife, when both were yearning for the other. His needing forgiveness. My fear of hearing the truth. My inability to just be there, to be present, even though I couldn’t fix anything. My being scared, not of his dying, but really of my own, so that I couldn’t help him go out with any ease. No blame here. I was young, and times were different then. There was no hospice. People did die alone. They still do, sometimes, though we’re beginning to know better. But not everything was wrong in this experience. The sons and grandsons were there. The Masons were there. My grandfather was honored in death. I was at least introduced to my own mortality. Eat to live. But know that you will die.

The thing that I am beginning to know, though—now that I’ve been with a lot of people at the end of their lives—the thing that impresses me is that death is not all that frightening for folks when they’re actually dying. In fact, people tend to die well—very well, I would say. It appears that thinking about death is a lot scarier than death itself. My observations were confirmed recently when I talked with a hospice worker, who has been witnessing death for over 15 years now. This is how he described the process of dying.

He said that most people come to a sense of peace in those final few days—they feel supported by a kind of life energy and enter into a state of softness and repose. Before they know that death is inevitable, they naturally want to talk about treatment options—they think "maybe it’ll work out." But once they accept that they are going to die, they seem to be almost relieved—and open in a way they have never been before.

Dying people have seen their bodies change, and as the body gives way under the illness, people become less and less identified with their body. They come to understand that they are not their body, and they do not show the shame or embarrassment that one might expect with nudity or loss of bladder or bowel control. They enter into a natural kind of mindfulness and meditation.

As the process goes on, the mind begins to lose its grip—sometimes because of medications, or chemotherapy. Just as they understand that they are not their body, they come to understand that they are not their mind. Their mind is consistently changing—memory and concentration become difficult, and near the end, they will go half in and out of consciousness. They enter into a state of being that feels quite purified—that is, not contaminated with feelings of fear, sadness, or vulnerability—a kind of natural meditation. Spiritually speaking, the end of life can be an extremely rich experience.

This is not to say that dying is necessarily easy. Sometimes there is pain, but generally pain can be controlled. As the various systems shut down, sometimes the body becomes agitated, breathing becomes labored. But this does not mean that the person is experiencing pain. In many ways the family of a dying person has it harder than the person who is actually dying, because they project their feelings and fears onto him.

How do we help a family member or friend die well? Dying people often worry about the ones they are leaving behind. They need to be reassured that these loved ones will be okay. Dying people need to be in the presence of love and care. They need to be reassured that there will be good pain support. They need to know that they will not die alone. It’s important for them to know that their lives have been meaningful, and a dying person commonly will want to do a kind of "life review, remembering what has gone before. Telling a person how much they have meant to you is very comforting.

Dying people are, more often than not, at peace and even hopeful, said the hospice worker. He went on to say that hope implies possibility. As human beings we have never, after all, had an experience when nothing comes next. There is a sense in the dying that something does come next. Our existence is changing all the time—a reflection of the impermanence the Buddhists speak of. From a strict materialist perspective, there is only matter, and when matter is gone, nothing is left. But as a dying person becomes detached from their body and mind, they realize that their essence is spirit, is consciousness, and consciousness cannot be reduced to matter.

Hopefully, we will not wait until that last week of life, however, to develop spiritual depth. In fact, the best way to assure a good death is to prepare for it all during your living days. One of the best sources of advice and help in preparing for death is the book called The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. The author, Sogyal Rinpoche, suggests that we reflect on death as a meditation—not when we are unhappy, but when we are inspired, relaxed, confident.

We are afraid of death, says, Rinpoche, because we don’t know who we are—we are living under an "assumed identity," which is laid bare, as our body begins to fail us. We have, he says, "raised the houses of our lives on sand." There are times in our lives when we may be more open to reflection. At these times, we can consolidate our learning, we can bring up from the depths what has been growing and maturing for years, and make it a part of who we are. Contemplation will bring a sense of renunciation. In Tibetan, renunciation means to "actually emerge" or to "be born." We give up our old ways and take on a greater vision, and move into a place of deeper joy.

George Harrison, of Beatles fame, died what I would call a "good death." When he learned he had terminal cancer in 2001, he quite naturally sought a cure. This mortal life is precious and should not be lightly tossed away. And so he resisted. A London paper quoted a family friend as saying, "George is fighting to the end." But actually Harrison was not holding on to life at all costs. He asked for a treatment that would minimize his need for painkillers, so that he could be alert, could be aware of his own dying. He wanted to die in a state of "God consciousness," he said. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr came to say goodbye. McCartney was moved as Harrison held his hand, consoling him. He continued to minister to his grief-stricken friends. He was aware that their vision of death was sad, but for him death was something different. "Death," he said, "is just where your suit falls off and now you’re in your other suit."

What it comes down to at the end is faith. Haven’t we always gotten through whatever? Haven’t we always been provided for? Isn’t there always a "next"? We don’t know what death is like because no one has come back to tell the tale—even "near death" experiences are not death, but near death. But we do know how the night gives way to day, and how in the spring, branches that have looked dead all winter all of a sudden are bursting out with color. Though most often we are not aware of it, we rest in a presence that held us before we were born and will carry us through our dying with more grace and meaning than we can yet imagine. So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we ask today for comfort. We are fearful creatures. It is hard to lose those we love. It is hard to lose our own lives, for this is all we know, all we have known. Let us live well today, for today is what we have been given. Let us live all our days with courage, that we may leave this world with hope. Let us rest in you, O Spirit of Life, knowing that we will never be forsaken. Amen.

 BENEDICTION

Go now into this spring day, and see how new life comes, again and again. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2003, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All right reserved.