Will I be walking down the street
and suddenly grip my chest and keel over?
Will I look up through hazy eyes at the
horrified stares
of people passing? Will I shit myself and
slip in to
unconsciousness as my body convulses?
Will I fade away in some hospital bed,
drifting in
and out of awareness and memory?
Will Jane be sat on the bed, holding my hand,
tears in her eyes and me not able to talk,
with barely
enough strength to squeeze her hand?
Perhaps there is a lorry out there right now,
the driver is whistling and worrying about
the rent.
The radiator and front mud guards are covered
with
mud and one day soon perhaps they will be
very
intimate with me as I cross the road without
my
usual caution.
To become aquatinted with death is an
important
part of Praxis. Almost everyone suffers at
death, even
those who are unconscious. . . .
Those who die quickly through trauma suffer
briefly,
but suffer nonetheless. Most people know that
they
are dying, and suffer pain of illness and
pain of loss,
which are unavoidable. If you practice
constancy,
at the point of death, you are not
diminished. If you
also suffer senility or mental illness, you
can take
constancy into that state; you may not be
able to
communicate, perhaps make little or no sense
to
others, but it will be you inside what is
happening
to you. If you have not practiced constancy
or
something like it, the chances are you will
have
no way of coping with the flood of deep
feelings
that arrive near death, as your self-image
begins
to fade. If you are unacquainted with deep
feelings,
they can be tidal waves of unrelenting
energy.
At this point the fear that lies below the
surface of
our everyday lives blazes into life. If you
have
avoided deep feelings all your life it is
hard to
face them when you are dying.
It is very hard indeed to break the habits
(patterns)
of a lifetime.
Becoming aquatinted with death is therefore
important
for two reasons,
- it informs and heightens our daily lives
- it prepares us for what happens after the
body dies.
We ignore death in our culture; apart from
the fact that
our culture is impoverished because of this,
we pay a
high personal price as well. It is not the
death of the
body that causes the most grief, nor the
parting from
the ones we love. The real death, is facing
the question:
have we loved enough?
Imagine that you have been knocked over,
you are lying in hospital . . . . . . . . . .
. the doctors
look grave and after you insist, tell you
that you will
die shortly, they are waiting to take you to
a ward.
The ones you love are not there. You hear
hospital
noises, even distant laughter, perhaps a baby
crying,
one of the nurses is moaning about some
aspect of
his job. You think, with a clarity you have
not had
before. you think: "I am dying. . . .
."
At that moment . . . .
what matters the
most to you?
all your plans
your possessions
your hope
your dreams
are slipping away.
what matters now?
It will be whether you have loved enough,
and fear and regret that you have not.
That fear and regret is in us right now,
deep in our hearts.
we must listen to it,
or death will have the victory.