You Are Dying
Here is
something that you might not like to think about; something that we don’t tend
to talk about in general, something that we avoid as much as possible: you are
dying, right now, and there is nothing you can do about it. You might be very healthy, eat well, exercise
regularly, not smoke or drink alcohol, but you are still dying. You don’t know when it is going to happen to
you (tomorrow? In twenty years?), but you can be sure that it is going to
happen.
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
Beloved on the earth.
curse than cry. And people don’t often
know what they’re saying in the end.
Or I could die in my sleep.
So I’ll say it now. Here it is.
Don’t pay any attention
If I don’t get it right
When it’s for real. Blame that
On terror and pain
Or the stuff they’re shooting
Into my veins. This is what I wanted to
sign off with. Bend
closer, listen, I love you.
Alden Nowlan
There is a
meditation technique where you imagine your own death. You imagine your body breathless and lifeless
and completely dead. Most people think
it sounds morbid, some people find the very idea of doing this frightening.
I have
practised a Tantric technique of meditation where you imagine your body (from
your right big toe) being burnt away, dissolving and disappearing, then you
imagine the same thing happening to the room around you, to the town in which
you live, to the people you know and love, to the world, to the universe. What does it make you feel to disintegrate
like this? How is it to watch those you
love burn into the ether in your imagination?
You need to
be a little brave to practise these meditations on death, but they will show
you some very interesting things… they will show you what you most identify
with (the man who said he could easily imagine dissolving everything away
except for his genitals, for example!).
In my own experience, I have no problem with the idea of dissolving away,
I feel that I am after all just a bundle of energy and full of life spirit, so
my sense of boundaries between the universe and this little bit of it called
Sarah are non-existent, but I did realise how attached I am to my voice, more specifically
to my words and this made me think about my need to communicate and to be
understood and to meditate on that and what it really means to me.
I wonder, in
these days where we can buy younger faces, have parts of our bodies that are
showing signs of age injected and sanded and smoothed by knives and needles and
chemicals, and where people talk of the medical possibility of living forever,
if we are missing the point completely.
Surely it is not about the quantity of years, but the quality of life that
we put into those years. Clearly our
fear of death is all pervasive, we ignore it, we deny it and we try to beat
it. In addition, we have lost most of
our rituals around death, the ways in which previous generations shared the
journey of someone from life to death and the ways in which that journey was
revered and respected, the way a dead body might be treated in death, might be
bathed or sat with overnight. The way
death used to be placed firmly where it should be, as a part of life.
I am no
expert on funeral rites, but it seems to me that there is a striking difference
between a modern British crematorium where an unseen, coffined body, disappears
behind a curtain to be industrially incinerated and the way an Indian body is
dressed and perfumed and surrounded by friends and family as it is burnt on a
perfumed ghat bedecked with flowers. The
former speaks to me of things hidden and denied, why does it make me feel that
we are slightly ashamed of death? The
latter seems to me more about celebration and life and light and releasing a
loved one back into the atmosphere, watching their bodies follow their souls into
the universe.
Recently I
heard Mark Gatiss talk about the death of his mother. How terribly sad, yet how wonderful it was
and how close the family became during the last days of her life. He described how he and his family sat around
her bed, drinking tea and talking and laughing at old family stories. Sometimes someone would leave to make a plate
of sandwiches or another pot of tea, but there they all were, revolving around
this woman that they loved, sharing love and laughter with her. She was unconscious, they did not know if she
could hear them, but they hoped that at some level she was aware of their
presence and their love. It sounded very
beautiful to me. It sounded like a
wonderful way to die.
I think it is
a very interesting practise to imagine that you are about to die. What might you do differently? What would you want? What would you want to say and to whom? Once you have taken some time to consider
this, you could ask yourself what it is that is stopping you doing all of those
things right now?
Here is the
last poem that Raymond Carver wrote before he died:
Late Fragment
And did you
get what
you wanted
from this life, even so?I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
Beloved on the earth.
It’s very
simple isn’t it and what most of us want.
Funny how we go about making it all so complicated and difficult and
finding ways of proving ourselves to those that we love or that we want to love
us, rather than being brave enough to tell them, or to ask them.
I suppose
that if I were dying and would not be here next week I would want to say thank
you to my mum and dad; I would want my sister to know that I love her and think
she is amazing; I would want to tell my children that they are to me the most
precious jewels and wonderful in every way; I would want the people that I love
to know about my love and admiration of them, to be sure of it and to know that
it does not falter. I would hope to hear
from them that they love me too and to be brave enough to ask those who find it
hard to reveal such things, ‘Have you loved me?’ Love, not for what I do, or what I have, or
the things I have achieved, but just because I am me and always have been. I would want to not be so shy, I would want
to be braver, write more, talk more, open my heart wider and wider.
I suppose
that if I were dying and would not be here next week, I wouldn’t waste so much
time on things that my heart knows don't matter, I wouldn’t procrastinate so often and I wouldn’t do so very much... I would sit in the garden with
the sun on my face and lie in the long grass in a field in the rain and I would go to be near the sea; I might
consider reading poems instead of novels and spend my time allowing my mind and
body absorb all the things I have learnt and read already, without feeling the
need to cram more in.
I suppose
that if I were dying and would not be here next week, I would hope for peace
and acceptance and to be both surrounded by and radiate love.
But when I
come to think of it like this, why wait?
These are all the things that I want and am hoping for in my life as well
as for my death. As Ram Dass says, ‘Don’t
waste time waiting’, the time is now and we know what is important to us, it
only behoves us to put those things at the top of our list and to deal with the
real issues of life – love, loving and using our talents to be who we are truly
– today, in this moment, which is the only thing we really ever have.
This Is What I
Wanted To Sign Off With
You know what
I’m
like when I’m
sick: I’d soonercurse than cry. And people don’t often
know what they’re saying in the end.
Or I could die in my sleep.
So I’ll say it now. Here it is.
Don’t pay any attention
If I don’t get it right
When it’s for real. Blame that
On terror and pain
Or the stuff they’re shooting
Into my veins. This is what I wanted to
sign off with. Bend
closer, listen, I love you.
Alden Nowlan
Live every day as if it were your last...for one day it will be...freewheel all the time! V.
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