The Advantage to Dying

Two days ago Maureen's father died of terminal cancer. (Our second date took place in Philadelphia after she had relocated here to be with him during this period.) I called the house yesterday but she had just stepped out. I spoke with her youngest sister on the phone. She's engaged to be married in November; there was a hope on the part of the whole family that her father would be able to see it. Maureen's told me a lot about her--about her job which routinely flies her to Paris and her fiancé who's sold B-movie screenplays to Hollywood. She's closer in age to myself than Maureen. She's also very sweet natured and less prone to butt heads with Maureen than some of the other sisters in the family (it is a big family dominated by women).

I was caught off guard when she introduced herself over the phone, and when I realized there was no Maureen available to speak with. Awkwardly I blurted out my condolences. I wish I had spoken in a more familiar tone.

While Maureen's father was dying he spoke with the dead. He didn't speak with the living--for instance, someone who simply wasn't there. He specifically had conversations with people who had already died, or other people who could not be identified. Some of his episodes were rife with metaphors involving trains and gates and times and unseen people, a little boy in particular, who would be helping or showing or opening or somehow involving themselves in a process which her father was preparing himself for.

Maureen's father was an phenomenal reader, a history buff who spent any free time in his study, surfacing occasionally for meals. He lost all interest in these things--books, newspapers, headlines--while he was dying. In a similar way his body stopped consuming calories--his weight dropped to 123lbs. Gradually he let go of the things which had comprised his life to that point. On Sunday Maureen sent out an email; hospice said that her dad probably had two weeks to live. He died the following afternoon.

Maureen is lucky because she was able to be with her dad while he was dying. They talked extensively; he talked a lot about his feelings about his life, perhaps because he was a good communicator to begin with, but also because hospice-care facilitates these types of activities. Someone once told me that, if we're lucky, we are born, we grow old, we get sick, and we die. That's if we are lucky, because that is what we are designed to do: part of our purpose in life is to die.

There is not a lot of time to our lives, and death reminds us. This makes choosing our life immediately important. It also lends perspective to life, when we consider our preoccupation with things like conflict and war and money and reputation. Large institutions--governments, corporations--don't experience mortality in the same way, so their cultures don't acknowledge it. It is easy for governments to justify war, for example, justified or not. That's because governments never die of cancer. They lose the advantage of having that perspective; they never gain that wisdom. So they persist, being consistently foolish, serving the needs of power, as all institutions naturally do. Even a fool can come close enough to death to have it touch them, and force a change in perspective. That's the advantage to dying.