I’ve written extensively about loss, a fact of retirement that I have eventually accepted. However, I have quite studiously avoided writing about the loss of a loved one through death. Death in general is a subject that I, like many others, prefer either to make more palatable through euphemisms (“passed away,” “gone to a better place’) or to ignore altogether.
When a friend of mine died, another friend of us both asked, “Have we reached the age where we are going to lose our friends?” My answer was, “Yes.” And then I changed the subject.
But I have been forced to drop my denial: death is real, death is permanent, death is the destination of each of our life journeys.
This new willingness to face up to the reality of death is a result of the loss of two dear people: a good friend, only 63, whose brain tumor took her life, and the son of another friend, only 58, who died after a stroke.
I asked all the usual questions: “Why did this happen to these two very good and kind people?” Why weren’t they healed? How can I accept these losses?”
The answers come in the process of grief. Grief, unlike the subject of death, cannot be denied. It is a process characterized by physical pain and longing, unhidden and uncontrollable tears, wishing for the power to go back and change the outcome, and slowly accepting the loss.
And I am aware that my reaction to these deaths has enabled me to face fears about my own.
How to prepare for death? In Against an Infinite Horizon, the author, Ronald Rolheiser, answers that question: “We do not prepare for death through any kind of withdrawal. The very opposite is true. What prepares us for death, anoints us for it, in Christ’s phrase, is a deeper, more intimate, and fuller entry into life. We get ready for death by beginning to live life as we should have been living it all along. . .to stretch our hearts to love wider and wider” (107).
Rolheiser also likens death to birth: like a baby in the womb who cannot imagine the world that he will eventually inhabit, so we too cannot imagine a world beyond this one. We are, he writes, sensual creatures: we process everything through our senses. But we are unable to use our senses to validate the existence of another world, and so we question its reality (116).
But like the unbelieving baby, our questions will be answered when we emerge from the womb of the earth into that new, larger, fantastic reality.
I refer again to Aging Faithfully and the wisdom and encouragement Freyling offers about death – the death of others and my own death. These deaths “have reminded me that I will not live forever. I am not immune to disease or to tragedy” (115).
“Death is not a subject to avoid. We do not need to be embarrassed or ashamed by our fear of death. God invites us to raise questions about all the fears we have, including those we have as we face this last stage of our journey” (114).
And then she offers a spiritual discipline “which may help us find peace in the midst of our anxiety: ‘peace in silence’” (115).
She explores Psalm 46 and the advice of Blaise Pascal, “the discipline of being still and knowing that God is God.”
And so, I have followed that advice as I deal with the overwhelming sadness of the loss of my two friends, as I have begun to understand more fully the reality of my own death, and I have found peace with both of those two unchangeable, very real facts of this time in retirement.