“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” – Revelation 21:6

I started working as a Hospice Volunteer a decade ago, and then at the Mansion for a lot of different reasons. One was a desire to deal with my own mortality, to see death, and learn about it.

Psychologists say that the fear of death is one of the deepest and most universal of human anxieties, which is perhaps why our society hides from it and seems stunned when it occurs.

We see images of violent deaths on the news every day, but otherwise, our natural death occurs out of sight and mind, our culture rarely deals openly with the fact that all of us will die. Or guides us in talking and thinking about it.

Death is a taboo in our culture, even though it is one of the very few things that we all have in common.

My experiences with death have transformed my understanding of it, and my fear of dying has mostly, if not entirely,  disappeared. I understand more about it and accept it as a part of life, not a shock or a betrayal tragedy.

When I was young, an aunt died, and I remember one of her sisters wringing her hands and crying out, “why did this have to happen to her?” But, I thought to myself, won’t this happen to all of us? Is this really a mystery?  I started thinking about death then.

I thank the good people who permitted me to share their deaths with them.  They were great and generous teachers. I decided to run towards it, not away from it.

I don’t dwell on dying, but I don’t run from it either or hide from the reality of it, as I did for so many years. I’ve seen a lot of people die in the past decade, and I see that those who think about it and talk about it once in a while often get to have the death they want.

And the death that all of us deserve.

The first thing I learned about death in my hospice and therapy work with dogs was that it could be sad, but also much more than that. No one in hospice asks how this could happen. That transforms the entire experience.

This has taken a great weight off of me and helped me to embrace life in a completely different way. When people – or dogs die – I am not shocked by it, I see it as life itself. I guess my ethos is Mourn And Live. Since everyone I know, including myself, will die, I don’t wish to spend too much of my life in mourning.

Like the Quakers taught me to do, I celebrate life, not death. I thank them for that.

A friend of mine called to tell me he was frightened of the coronavirus, he feared getting it and dying from it, as he is older and has respiratory medical issues. He is well aware that he is at risk.

He asked me how I felt about it since people like him, and I are at the highest risk of dying. In San Francisco, officials are urging people 60 and over to stay indoors.

I said I don’t expect to contract that virus, but if I did, I hope I would understand that I have to die of something, and I’d rather die from the virus than spend years wasting away in a nursing home. Sooner or later – the odds suggest sooner – my time will come, and I have nothing much to say about how or when.

That is the mystery of life.

Since we are the only animal on the earth believed to understand the concept of death, I think it is my duty to follow it thoughtfully and thoroughly. I owe it that respect.

A half-century ago, Philosopher Paul Tillich wrote that it is our destiny and the destiny of everything in our world that we must come to an end. Every end that we experience in nature and mankind speaks to us with the same loud voice, he wrote: “you will also come to an end!”

This reality may reveal itself in several different ways.

We might leave a place we have lived in for a long time, separate from friends we know and cherish, experience the death of someone near to us, fail in work that had meaning, end a period of our life and move to another.

Old age reveals the coming of the end, and so can the loss of color and light at the end of each autumn or the dark days that follow. All of this speaks to the same truth: you and I will also come to an end.

I’ve experienced all of these ideas and triggers about ending. And as I am getting older; death cannot and should not be a remote idea for me, to be brushed aside and ignored until it is upon me, and I lose my voice in it.

Death doesn’t dominate my life, but it is there, it is the reality of my life. And I want and need to write about it from time to time.

As people, we are uniquely aware of the eternal to which we all belong and from which we are liberated by the passing of time.

When I listen to the news, I comforted by the realization that we are all one thing, not billions of different things. What unites us more than anything is dying.

Prayer, meditation, self-awareness have brought me to this: If one is not able to die well, is he or she able to live well?

My task is to live meaningfully, and well, death can take care of itself.

For most of my life, I embraced the expectation of a long life, the idea of death was delayed, far off, something to be considered later and when unavoidable. In our culture, that almost guarantees a miserable death, carried out by strangers and unfamiliar places.

The young expect an endless future in which we can always hope for happiness and success. As a rule, they don’t ever have to think about death and talk about it—all the greater shock when it comes.

One young friend told me he was struggling with the shock of losing a parent; his mother was in her 80’s when she died.

But what did you expect would happen? I asked. He said he never thought about it. Am I being cold and unsympathetic?

I’ve had this conversation with scores of people over the years about dogs. I know as a dog lover that my dogs are likely to die before me, and I’ve lost many.

Yet so many people seemed stunned when their dogs die. What did they think would happen? Talking about death and thinking about it has helped me to accept it and, when I can, move forward.

Many people turn to the idea of life after death as a comfort. If we don’t die, we have nothing to fear. The end can be delayed again and again. To me, that is deception, another way of hiding. I understand many people feel differently and respect their feelings.

I can only speak for myself. And to be honest, do I want to do this over and over and over again, through all time?

I share Tillich’s idea that an endless future is without a final aim or purpose. Do I need to grow and learn and do good if I get to do it again and again? Tillich says if we want to speak in truth without foolish, wishful thinking, we should talk about the eternal now, which is neither timelessness or endless time.

It’s a fantastic thing to think about. We go towards something that is not yet, and we come from something that is no more. The idea of the eternal now takes us above the conventional wisdom about death.

The Eternal Now, says Wikipedia, is a concept of time perception suggested by various proponents of New Age spirituality, including Zen Buddhism. It’s elements vary from increased awareness of the present to a broader understanding of death and the past and the future.

Zenthinking.org describes the Eternal Now in this way: “All that IS exists within consciousness, including all concepts of space and time, including all remnants of cultural history. Space and time exist within you, Conscious Awareness. You do not exist within them. YOU are the Eternal Now.”

I am grateful that I got closer to death, in part, so that I could shed some of my fear about it.  I grieve when someone I love dies, for sure, and I sometimes think fearfully about how and where I shall die, and how I can have the death I would like to have.

The Eternal Now is a new theory for me, but I don’t understand it well enough yet to accept it as a core belief about dying.

But more than anything else, I have come to see death as a universal experience, and it no longer shocks or stuns me. The more I accept it and talk about it, the better I feel, and the better I will do.

Maria and I often talk about the fact that I am likely to die before her, although she reminds me she might die first. We can even joke about it now.

As it gets closer, we will befriend it, and when it comes, we will, to the best of our abilities, embrace it and celebrate the chance I had to live it. Because I believe I will only live once, I am all the more grateful for the life I had.

That’s the plan.