In the course of hospice work I’m able to sit with people right after their passing. This occurs after the nurses have removed medical paraphernalia, family and friends have left the hospital, and just before the funeral transport arrives. Entering the room with a bow, I tidy remaining flower wrappings, drinking cups, tissue paper, extra chairs, and the like.
I then give full attention to the body lying in repose, aware of flowers, religious icons, childrens’ drawings, and other farewell memerobilia. Turning inwards to find my breath, I notice that I am not alone in the room, yet the only one breathing. An eerie sensation. Life has ended, yet life goes on.
As I behold the deceased, I offer a loving-kindness chant of “May you be at ease” and “May your family be free from pain” and a prayer, composed in the moment, asking God to take care of the living and the dead. Sometimes I place my hand on the deceased’s hands or forehead: witnessing the receeding warmth and invading coolness of death.
I often wonder: where did this person go? What became of a life’s worth of struggling, coping, loving, learning, and enjoying? One moment beloved Gran, the next a mere body. Curiosity arises: where did her soul go, where the self?
Rodney Smith, a Seattle-based meditation teacher and long-time hospice worker, writes–
“Death takes the self away. The body and the brain go, leaving us with nothing to call our own. All expressions of our individuality are over. Everything we related to an “I” has died. Who are we after death? We do not become somebody when we die. We become nobody. This is perhaps death’s greatest teaching. It directs us to the truth of what we have always been. The “I” and “me” die with death. Death eliminates our sense of separation. What is left after death is common to us all.
“… Death speaks to something more profound than our self-imposed limitations. We cannot carry our identity with us as we go, for death is bigger than anyone, bigger than the king and the beggar, the genius or the simpleton.”
“… The great message of death is the message of timelessness, of infinity, of mystery. If we hold death only within our thoughts, then the truth of death is obscured by what we want it to be. We must, instead, go through death and become death itself. We must enter into death, become one with the stillness of death. Death’s message is one of hope and love, for it points the way to the very fulfillment of life, not to its diminishment. We study death in order to learn how to live.”
source: Smith, R. (1998). Lessons from the dying. Boston: Wisdom Press, pp. 200, 203. image: Cover of Lakotta, B. and Schels, W. (2004). Noch mal leben vor dem Tod. Muenchen: DVA. Book of photos taken shortly before and after the death of hospice patients in Hamburg, with biographical stories.
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