a time, as I focused on my writing career, I was able to put aside my fear of death, like a book I’d read and put back on its shelf. Then something happened. My mother died suddenly of a stroke. Death, my old adversary, reannounced itself as the fundamental struggle of my life. It was an adversary my life-loving mother could not overcome, and one I knew no measure of my own will could vanquish either.
What haunted me most about my mother’s death was its suddenness. How could a person who was talking, joking, and enjoying a meal of eggplant parmesan one Sunday no longer exist the next? Walking into my parents’ living room for the first time after my mother’s death, I was overwhelmed by the stillness. The house reeked of silence.
I wondered if her death—or any death—might be easier to cope with if there had been some warning that it was imminent. Or is it better we don’t know it’s the last year, the last week, the last day, and we simply live our lives and love who we love right up to the end?
Hour by hour keep careful watch over all you do, aware that God’s gaze is upon you wherever you may be.
—FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS”
Around the time my mother died, I had another extraordinary experience. I was walking in downtown Chicago when I noticed a police cordon in front of an office tower. I asked a bystander what had happened, and he told me a window had fallen out of the twenty-first floor of the building. It struck a woman who had been walking with her daughter, killing the young mother instantly—as unpredictable a death as you can imagine. Once again, death seemed like some maniacal sharp shooter, randomly picking its targets. I could not stop thinking about that woman. One minute she was walking along Wabash Avenue holding her little girl’s hand, and the next barreling through to the afterlife. It reminded me of a line in “For the Anniversary of My Death” a poem by W.S. Merwin. “Every year without knowing it, we pass the date of our death.”
I thought about the possibility of my own death. How I hoped it would not just show up at my door, a discourteous guest, but drop a note in the mail instead, months or weeks before, as polite company would do. I remembered a character Ben Gazzara played in an old TV drama called Run for Your Life, a lawyer who is told he has six months to live. He spends that time driving across the country, helping complete strangers wherever he stops to find their purpose in life. Maybe I could be like that. I hoped I would have time to tear up my journals, press the clothes in the laundry basket, finish the crossword puzzles on my nightstand, toss out my torn underpants, and apologize for decades of bad behavior before removing the robe of life.
A few years after my mother’s death, when I began spending extended periods at Mount St. Scholastica Monastery, one of the first friends I made was then eighty-nine-year-old Sister Lillian Harrington. I got to know Sister Lillian very well, and felt comfortable enough with her to share my intense fear of dying. One day, I asked her if she ever thought about the moment of death. She drilled her steely blue eyes into mine and told me something I’ve never forgotten. “I don’t think about dying,” she said, “I think about living.”
Living mindfully, looking beyond the obvious—these were things Sister Lillian did, along with drinking strawberry daiquiris and enjoying birthday cake just a few days before she died at the age of ninety-six.
Witnessing the dying, death, and burial of a sister at the Mount was another profound experience. The sisters confront death not begrudgingly, but rather lovingly, tenderly. Unless a sister dies suddenly, or away from the monastery, no one dies alone. The sisters keep a twenty-four hour vigil at the bedside of the dying. They call it “sitting with” the person. As a woman without children of my own and a husband who is nine years older, I sometimes wonder who will be sitting with me.
When the casket returns from the funeral home bearing a sister’s body, every member of the community lines up to meet it, as a bell tolls in the monastery tower. The night before the burial is for storytelling—a time for the community to remember the sister they lost—her gifts, shortcomings, eccentricities, and all.
With one sister carrying high a crucifix, community members march behind the casket the next morning to the cemetery. They stride with purpose and abandon to the gravesite. The first time I witnessed this, I remember thinking, these must be the only truly free people in America.
I don’t think that their fearlessness in the face of death comes solely from their belief in eternal life. As Sister Lillian once said to me, “We don’t know what happens to us after death, we just believe.” I think their equanimity comes from the confidence that each one of them has lived a meaningful life. In the same chapter of The Rule in which Benedict asks us to daily remind ourselves we are going to die, he also gives us a blueprint for how to live:
Pray for your enemies out of love for Christ. If you have a dispute with someone, make peace before the sun goes down. And finally, never lose hope in God’s mercy.
—FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS”
These are things we probably should have been taught in kindergarten.
I once interviewed a member of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, an association of nonbelievers. She happened to be a cancer survivor. She said death is what gives meaning to life. Believing that nothing awaits us beyond this life spurs us to make the most of this life. I think she got it wrong. I believe it is life that gives meaning to death. As Joan Chittister writes, “The fundamental question for a Christian isn’t whether there’s life after death, but whether there’s life before death.”
These days, as I hurtle toward middle age, I’m inspired by the artist Candy Chang. In cities across America, Chang creates interactive art installations that consist of a chalkboard, often placed on the side of a building next to a bucket of colored chalk. Stenciled on the chalkboard is the sentence, “Before I die I want to …” Chang leaves space for people passing by to fill in their response. These are some of the responses people have written:
Before I die I want to:
And one wish that catches in my throat every time I read it:
The philosopher Steve Cave gave a talk a few years ago on National Public Radio’s Ted Radio Hour. His topic was, “Why Are Human Beings Afraid To Die?” Cave spoke of his own fear of death from an early age. It sounded very similar to mine. He said he eventually discovered a new way of thinking about death that helped him with his fear.
“I find it helps to see life as being like a book,” Cave said. “A book is bound by its covers … so our lives are bounded by birth and death.” He continued by saying that the characters in a book know no horizons. They are not afraid of reaching the last chapter, because they only know the moments that make up their story. We humans who are characters in life “need not worry how long our story is, if it’s a comic strip or an epic,” Cave said. “The only thing that matters
