Destination The Journey

I felt moved to share something that was arising for me during meditation this morning, especially since it has been a little while since I’ve posted anything. Just want you guys to know–my dear blog community–that I actually miss you guys, knowing what you’re up to, what your musing over, deliberating about. And when I’m finished with this project, I look forward to knowing, more intimately, what you guys are up to in the blogosphere.

So I was thinking about death, the process of arriving there. I’d taken a hiatus from bedside nursing for a while because I physically couldn’t do it due to the illness I went through a couple of years ago. But now I’m back at the bedside taking care of cardiac patients mostly, and those, who for some reason, need to have their hearts monitored.

A couple of weeks ago I took care of a twenty-five year old with a severe case of Lupus, so severe he has end-stage renal disease, requiring him to receive dialysis three days a week in order to live. His life expectancy couldn’t be more than a decade. His mother died when he was seventeen of lymphoma, his father is a wealthy business man who jet-sets around the world with little time for his son, and his brother has “problems of his own”, which keep him occupied and with little time to visit his ailing brother. So, the young man is facing this life-altering terminal situation alone.

Yesterday I took care of  an eighty-nine year-old who was about to find out that there is a large inoperable mass pressing on his intestine from the region around his pancreas, responsible for the intractable nausea and vomiting. His options are limited to palliative care. He was surrounded by loved ones and had led a fruitful happy life.

Over the past couple of years I’ve really started to shake hands with death–look him in the eye and acknowledge his presence, get to know him on a deeper level than just the arm’s-length knowledge that it’ll happen one day. In some way, I feel that the process of becoming aware of death on more than just an intellectual level can be likened to a tale about the old lady in the creepy house down the street who all the neighborhood kids are sure is a witch. They see curtains move from the upstairs window when they are playing nearby. The are sure they hear cackling and wicked noises coming from the house when there is a full moon. They catch a glimpse or two of the mass of gray hair as she quickly escapes back into the confines of the house when the sun rises. 

Then one day, a little boy gets hurt outside in her yard, and the old witch-lady comes for him. He is howling, crying, and when she gets to him he sees her soft smile as she reaches gently out to wash off his bleeding knee with her warm washcloth, picking him up and setting him upright on his two feet as gently as anyone has ever handled him.

The reason I keep bringing up death from time to time may have something to do with the fact that I made it to the other side of a life-altering illness, could be because I just turned thirty-five and it seems to me that is middle age for some, or it could have something to do with my meditation practice waking me up to the transitional nature of reality on a much deeper level than I realized before. I don’t know. 

But I bring it up because it makes the miracle of life seem so much more like a miracle than the grind of the nine-to-five-without-time-to-pause-and-breathe allows, and because when we start to get it on the experiential level, we lose the fear that prevents us from pursuing our dreams. If we really understand that we’re going to be dead sooner than we realize, we tend to release that which no longer serves us, and spend our precious moments, as Rumi says, letting the beauty of what we love, be what we do-with faith that all of the details work out seamlessly with little effort. And we become less afraid of death, because we come to understand with a depth far surpassing intellectual knowledge, what death is.