Buddhists the contemplation of death lies at the heart of life. Preparation for death begins with living a meaningful life built on love, compassion and truth, for these virtues will ensure a positive death experience and an auspicious rebirth. Faith in the spiritual side of life makes it easier to let go into death. Meditation, yoga, prayer or a simple innocent faith in God brings awareness of the life force which exists beyond, around and within the body but is not dependent on it. Gathering our spiritual resources brings peace of mind and eases physical or mental distress as the soul becomes a place to which we can retreat. It is this connection to our inner divine nature which enables us to approach death with less fear.
The fear of death is a universal response to the unknown but as we learn to trust in the universal laws of creation which show us that birth, growth, decay and death are the everlasting cycles of life which govern our existence on this Earth we can begin to trust that our journey will be a safe one, that, as the scholar and teacher Joseph Campbell wrote, ‘Out of the rocks of fallen wood and leaves, fresh sprouts arise, from which the lesson appears to have been that from death springs life and out of death, new birth.’
I want every human being not to be afraid of death, or of life; I want every human being to die at peace, and be surrounded by the wisest, clearest, and most tender care, and to find the ultimate happiness that can only come from an understanding of the nature of mind and of reality.
Soygal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
I have always found the actual moment of death to be blissful. Even people who have been terribly frightened of dying relax into death, which becomes something resembling euphoria. In my experience the moments of death and birth are the closest we come to deity.
Clare Proust
SOUL MIDWIFE
Claire Proust is a soul midwife who has also helped many souls cross the boundary between life and death. She compares the process to the labour pains of birth and as a soul midwife provides the practical, emotional and spiritual support for the dying and their families, helping them to face the forces of death with calmness, openness and strength.
As a former nurse, she found that almost all the deaths which she experienced in hospitals were deeply traumatic, thanks to the overwhelming fear of death which often results in unnecessary and invasive surgery and little compassionate preparation for the dying. For seven years she virtually single-handedly ran The Voyager Trust, which pioneered the provision of the holistic and noninvasive care for the dying and bereavement counselling for the families. She believes that the taboo around death in the West is so overwhelming that most people are paralysed by it and yet she found that with simple honesty and compassion most people are able to quite quickly overcome their fears of both their own dying and the deaths of those around them, becoming instead empowered by the experience.
Clare advocates that each person must be given the space and the time to die as they want to die. Each death is unique and, as with labour and birth, each person needs to be allowed to die in their own way.
She describes an incident in one hospital where she was working a night shift which almost restored her faith in the medical profession’s emotional ability to cope with death. An old man was gasping his last breaths. He had lung cancer and was confused and coughing phlegm. He kept calling out a woman’s name and became distressed when she did not appear. One of the doctors on the ward decided to take action. He climbed into bed with the old man and held him in his arms. The old man said, ‘Kiss me,’ and without hesitation, the doctor kissed him and continued to hold him until he died very peacefully. Some of the staff criticized the doctor’s behaviour, but for Clare it was a wonderful lesson in compassion and humility. ‘The world did not end when meaningful physical contact was made with a patient. What did happen was that a tired, ill, confused and sad person was soothed and died in love.’
THE GATEWAY
The old and the sick mostly die in the quiet just before dawn as the metabolic rhythm of the body reaches its lowest energy point. It is the darkest moment before dawn, the time of the greatest peace. In Sweden they call it the hour of the wolf.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead gives a definitive description of the processes of death. As the organs fail, the senses shut down and the mind-body connection ends. At the moment of death the elements out of which the body is made are said to dissolve into each other: earth into water, water into fire, fire into wind and wind into consciousness or pure ether.
Air is the element of the mind and as that begins to dissolve it feels as though the whole world is swept away by a great wind as it expands into consciousness and all inner energies gather in the heart in the moments before the end of physical life. There are three final breaths as the three drops of blood collect in the ‘channel of life’ at the centre of the heart. Then silence. At this moment an atmosphere of profound peace descends in the room.
For spiritual practitioners this is the moment of liberation of the spirit from the confines of the body. The Tibetans talk of the consciousness flying out of the crown of the head, sometimes with such force that a fragment of bone in the skull is displaced. The Native American describes death as though the body were an old coat which simply falls away to reveal the naked soul underneath. The Sadhus (Hindi holymen) will discard the body when it has lost its ability as a vehicle for enlightenment with no emotion at all. It has become a burden to their onward journey, so they are able to arrest the functions of the body and journey in one seamless movement from life into death. Certain Himalayan yogis will simply go and sit outside, enter a state of deep meditation and allow their body to freeze around them.
There’s no real training for a soul midwife other than just doing it. I know that there are hundreds of people, men and women, who have dealt with just one death as a soul midwife. They were just there at the right time and were capable and moved to say and do the right thing.
Clare Proust
Emma Restall Orr, a Druid priestess and poet, explains that in the mystical tradition of Druidry the adept hopes to reach a state of ecstasy – a profound communion with the divine – at the moment of death. This moment of ecstatic union is said to cleanse the psyche of all the events, hopes and fears of the last life so that the lessons and emotions are not continued into the next. At the point of death you call out the name of your God. In Hindu tradition the aim at death is the same: to consciously give yourself over to the divine. When Gandhi was assassinated his last words were, ‘Ram, Ram’ (God, God), which according to Hindu belief ensures his soul’s place above the trials of rebirth.
BRIDGE OF FAITH
Helena was not a spiritual person at all, although her husband Patrick has ‘enormous, unshakeable faith’ in Catholicism. She was diagnosed with cancer in January, just before she gave birth to twin boys. She was 28 and she had two other sons, a five year old and a three year old. Julia, her sister-in-law and an expert in palliative care, had helped many people cope with the fear of dying but the acute suffering of someone she loved was unbearable. ‘In the middle of the night she would come down to the kitchen and scream at me: “Please don’t let me die, please don’t let me die. I’ve got four tiny babies. Please don’t let me die.” And there was nothing I could do to save her.’
Despite his desperate sadness Patrick accepted Helena’s pending death from the moment of her diagnosis; he felt that they had been given this ‘cross to carry’ for a reason to which they were currently blind. He cared for her at home and sustained her during her darkest moments. He did not try to hide the truth of her sickness from himself or her and encouraged openness with the children. And he prayed and prayed that she might get better.
