When Death Comes

I wrote last week about the Dylan Thomas poem, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" (you can read the poem and the post about it below). Thomas urged, according to some who know his life and work better than I, approaching death with "rage" and with a kicking-and-screaming resistance. The poem references his dying father, though Thomas may have intended to portray his own stance toward death.

Rather than adopt Thomas' words literally, I've approached the poem's encouragement to rage and resistance as an invitation to ongoing life, creativity, and exploration, even to breath's end. For myself, I hear: "Don't stop living, don't give up your exploration, don't stop becoming, even in the face of death."

I think of my dear friend Paul, a gentle soul who did not literally "rage," but who continued to explore his own unique path right to the moment when the darkness suddenly and unexpectedly consumed him. He was not a "rager" in any way, no anger in him that I could see. He was a lover, yet full of questions that could not be answered. But Paul's doubt was an honest doubt. It wasn't showy doubt, or doubt for the sake of doubt. He had honest questions about God and life. But every day he gave himself to a core practice of prayer and meditation. He faithfully kept searching, even in his questioning.

When I talked with him, he was never interested in convincing me of anything. He had no agenda in which he needed "converts" to his own intricate pattern of belief and unbelief. He simply loved in his gentle way. I always felt that Paul's spirit in the world was healing, so great was his capacity to love without condition. Up to his last day, he honestly explored what, for him, were the big questions of life. And he did so with love. When he died suddenly, he left a huge void in the world . . . a loss of his presence, his love, his questions, and his healing.

I think of another dear friend currently in hospice care. She is not literally raging while in palliative care in Houston, but she is exploring this new threshold fully. She is not passive nor idle. As her sister said to me recently, in life she taught us how to live, and now as another threshold approaches she is teaching us how to die. Even now, she is centered by a daily practice of sitting prayer and meditation. She is held, not in rage, but in ongoing exploration, in her continual creative impulse to live the one life which she has been given, and in her openness as she moves through this season of her life.

She has been my spiritual guide for decades, and has been the wise soul of the spiritual landscape in Southeast Texas, as well as within her own religious order. She has guided us in life, and now she is guiding us as she approaches a different threshold . . . not by a kicking-and-screaming rage, but by her own life centered in the heart of God.

Both of these friends have embodied in their journeys what Mary Oliver has written in her poem, "When Death Comes." For me the poem is a statement of intention about becoming, searching, questioning, and exploring right up to the end of life. Never angry or raging, Mary Oliver in the poem simply invites an explorer's heart that carries one to the final threshold.


When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.


[Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press]