Once, while working at Hospice, I was assigned a client (I’ll call her Judy) who had been in the hospital for several days, having outlived the doctors’ expectations that she would die within a day or two. They were considering sending her to a long-term facility. Each day, after seeing my other hospice clients at my office, I would head over to the hospital to sit with Judy. She could barely speak at this point so we usually just sat mostly in silence. I didn’t know anything about her life, having met her at the end, but that didn’t matter. In fact, not knowing her allowed me to be present with her without any pre-conceived ideas about who she was. Working with death and dying is working with people at their most authentic—in touch with the deeper levels of who they are. The extraneous and unessential parts have been stripped away. I felt a closeness with Judy and I experienced a peacefulness in her presence. I looked forward to our visits after the intense work with my other clients at my hospice office.
One night, after our regular evening visit, I had a dream: Judy got up out of the hospital bed and changed into her street clothes. She made the bed, folded her hospital gown and placed it neatly on the pillow. She paused for a moment, looking around the room, then walked out the door. I woke up with a start and looked at the clock—it was 4:07 a.m. Thinking she must have been transferred to the other facility after I had left her that evening, I went back to sleep. Next morning, when I got to work, I learned she had died peacefully in her sleep around 4 a.m.
I felt a deep sense of gratitude toward Judy. In the brief time our paths crossed, she gave me a great gift in sharing with me her peaceful and natural death. There was a natural sense of completion and moving on to the next phase. Isn’t that what we would all wish for?
The yogis of India say death is like changing your clothes. They say it provides us with a fresh start, a new beginning. It is not the end that we fear it is, but a continuation, a new chapter. Death opens the door to infinity. We fear death, they say, because we fear the constant change that is life. We fear the unknown and hold onto the known, the past, instead of allowing life to unfold naturally in the eternal, timeless Now. We resist both life and death. Death invites us to release our grasp on the ever-vanishing past and embrace the ever-new present with all it has to offer. Isn’t that what life asks of us moment to moment? This way we are in harmony with the nature of life. Becoming intimate with death, we learn to be intimate with life.
Consider This: Embrace change to live in alignment with the wisdom of Nature. What other choice is there?
