the course of her illness Helena underwent an extraordinary transformation which began when Julia took her to Lourdes, which is renowned as a place of profound spiritual healing. Helena’s transformation was dramatic. Suddenly she became more peaceful. She had resolved something in her mind. The fear had gone.
Father Edward, the priest who had married the couple and who would eventually convert and finally bury Helena, describes her as being bestowed by the ‘grace of faith’. None of her friends could believe the sense of peace which she carried with her until her death.
In September Cardinal Hume said he would say a Novena for her. A Novena is nine days of prayer for a specific intention. On the first night Cardinal Hume held a mass in the crypt at Westminster cathedral with all the family’s closest friends and relatives, many of whom had never prayed before, and they prayed that Helena might get well. Then, each day for nine days, all of them repeated the prayer for a miracle.
Helena was amazed that so many people were praying for her and her faith, grace and peace grew day by day, even though she was getting sicker and sicker. When she came to the cathedral for the final prayer of the Novena she could just about walk from the car to the crypt, where she stood surrounded by all her friends and family praying for one last time. Hume anointed Helena with oil on her forehead and on her hands, a rite which is healing as well as bringing to the recipient the special graces that Jesus brought to the sick as he moved among them, healing and touching them.
Helena died in November, three weeks after converting to Catholicism. She died while Patrick was holding her hand and they were saying a rosary together, at the very moment of saying, ‘Help us now on the day of our death...’ Patrick still remembers her death as the most powerful moment of his life. At her funeral he asked everyone not to mourn her memory but to close their eyes and feel her presence as he had done at the moment of her death.
Despite the catastrophe of his wife’s death and having four young boys to look after, Patrick’s faith never wavered. He had grieved so much with Helena when she was alive that he was able to return to his life quite smoothly. Some months later a friend suggested that her cousin come to help him with the children. ‘She is very together and very loving,’ she said, ‘and she adores children.’ She moved in in January and Patrick married her in May. The kids adore her and every Sunday when they light a candle and say their prayers they say one for their mother in heaven and one for their mother on Earth.
St Augustine said that prayer was when heart speaks to heart and during all those weeks of prayer Helena’s heart opened wide to the body of faith which helped her to leave this life in a state of grace and peace. No doubt she is watching over her family.
Simon Barrington Ward, former Bishop of Coventry, describes the ideal death as perfect surrender. It is, he says, the ultimate healing when we can leave all our pain and limitation behind. As he traces the cross with oil on the foreheads of the dying he is performing a final rite of blessing, healing and grace as they hand themselves over to God. When he visits the dying he describes to them the idea of giving themselves up to a wave or stream of love which will envelop the soul on death. He invokes a God who is walking through the valley of pain and despair with them, ready to gather them to Him despite all their sins or failings.
Mother Theresa saw the face of Jesus on the poorest of the poor whom she rescued every day for more than 20 years from dying in the streets of Calcutta. She believed that to minister to the dying was to minister to Christ on the cross. This belief is uniformly shared by the nuns who move around her home for the dying silently and efficiently, washing those unable to wash themselves, massaging the legs of those unable to walk, comforting those who by tomorrow will be dead. She taught them to see in their suffering the suffering of Christ.
Although the Missionaries of Charity do not claim an explicit mission to deliver the souls of the dying to Christ, Mother Theresa has probably helped thousands of them move on to eternity thanks to the tender care and gentle faith of her nuns. They bring a dignity and calm to a death which otherwise would be agitated and painful.
The dying often choose to go through the gateway alone. Children and the old especially seem to find it easier to let go when they are not in the presence of the people who love them. The family may feel terrible that they were not at their side, but usually the dying do choose their moment of death.
Death is the ending of one phase of consciousness. It is only a process whereby we have to hand ourselves over to something bigger than ourselves. We have to be willing to die to our own selves so that we can grow into the next phase of consciousness. This is a process which goes on all our lives. Every step of trust and surrender where we give ourselves over to something bigger than us – love, children or compassion for humanity – is really just a practice and preparation for dying.
Bishop Barrington Ward
In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying Soygal Rinpoche recommends a simple but extremely powerful visualization practice known as phowa for both those who are dying and those who are caring for them. Phowa means the ‘transference of consciousness’ and is a simple meditative process of relaxing the body while the mind invokes an embodiment of whatever the practitioner believes in. This can be Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mary, St Francis, a guardian angel or simply a vision of pure golden light. Everyone is encouraged to visualize their own embodiment of the divine filling the heart and mind with a peace which allows the soul to merge with a pure body of light.
For the rest of us the monks advise that we reach our death thinking loving and compassionate thoughts, praying to be reborn in the realms of golden light or as another human being on the journey toward enlightenment and holding our own vision of Divine Truth in our mind’s eye as darkness comes.
The breath of life which enters our bodies at birth in a great inhalation then leaves us with a sigh.
DEATH
What does death feel like? More than eight million people have died and come back to life again and they come back with extraordinary tales of the world beyond. What is remarkable is that most people tell similar stories and remember the whole experience with astonishing clarity. Dr Raymond Moody’s collection of case studies, Life after Life (Mockingbird Books, 1975), one of the first books on the subject, identified a number of what he called ‘core experiences’.
In every instance people describe the sensations of dying as feelings of peace, stillness and serenity. Once out of their bodies, when they hear the doctors or onlookers pronounce them dead, they move toward a long dark tunnel at the end of which is a brilliant white light which draws them onward and envelops them in an all-consuming love. Even those with no religious convictions or belief in an afterlife have similar experiences and describe the light as emanating from an ancestor, angel, religious figure or other spiritual being.
Some people have come back describing encounters with pure light beings or angels who look like the angels of classical art – people of extraordinary grace and beauty with wings growing out of their shoulders. Others claim to have met spiritual masters like Jesus or Buddha. Usually they are asked telepathically what they have done with their lives. Few feel judged or afraid and most feel such peace that they do not want to return. Most of the ‘near dead’ feel unconditional love and safety in this light. Few of them want to return and yet all of them are turned back. There is usually a boundary, a wall, a river or a great sea beyond which they cannot pass. It is usually here that they are given instructions or the choice to return.
Soizic Aureli remembers the terrible shock of plummeting back into a body wracked with pain after dying during an operation for cancer when she was 33. When she left her body she had been given a clear choice:
This angel-type person said to me:
