Embracing Our Own Mortality

“From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life’s midday, the parabola is reversed, death is born.”

~ C.G. Jung, “The Soul and Death”

Most of us don’t want to think about our own death. Dying is this distant, vague event that is too depressing or frightening or unreal to contemplate, and we don’t control it anyway, so why waste time and emotion thinking about it?

What constitutes a good death??Is it the commonly shared wish for dying peacefully and painlessly in our sleep? Or perhaps it’s only after a long and fulfilled life? If that’s a good death, then what’s a bad death? The opposite, being alone and in pain till the end?

Florida Scott-Maxwell unveils the shadow reality of old age and waiting for death:

“I don’t like to write this down, yet it is much in the minds of the old. We wonder how much older we have to become, and what degree of decay we have to endure. We keep whispering to ourselves, ‘Is this old age yet?’ ‘How far must I go?’ For age can be dreaded more than death. …It is waiting for death that wears us down, and the distaste for what we may become.”

But facing and even embracing mortality has very little to do with death and everything to do with life.?The sooner you deal with it, the more time you will have to benefit from the insights you gain into true happiness and fulfillment and the path to accomplishing your true masterpiece, your most visionary achievement yet.

In my interview with Carolyn Conger for?Visionaries Have Wrinkles?(2012), she shared her view of death and dying and her embrace of her own mortality:

“I work with people who are headed toward death. …I am comfortable with the idea of death, and with the procedure of death. I go through periods where it’s fascinating to think about death and the simple mysteries that surround it. …Truthfully, I am not worried about the act of dying. …I think that one of the reasons that we have death is so that we can appreciate life.?Everything is part of a cycle. Elderhood is a cycle. …The cycle of death is just one of those. …I also know that the passage can be easy. I trust that I’ll be able to do it well. The things that concern me about death are that somebody’s going to have to clean up my mess here.”

For tens of thousands of years we accepted death as a natural part of life.?But by the end of the nineteenth century, that thinking was eliminated; in its place, death and dying became unnatural, dirty, to be hidden from view.?Prior to the 1900s, people were allowed to die a natural death in hospitals or allowed to spend their last days at home with their loved ones in attendance. Ever since the 1900s, as medical science has dedicated more of its resources to saving lives, the facilitation of our passing on goes overlooked.

Why do we in the United States have more trouble with the idea of death than other cultures? According to studies on death and dying,?72 percent of Americans believe in an afterlife and two percent believe in reincarnation.?So what’s the problem? Is it our fixation with youth? Clearly the better our life, the more we are able to embrace death.

I recently found a quote by Ram Dass where he states eloquently, “The art of being able to look directly at death and directly at suffering is a function of your ability to find in yourself that which is not changing, which is not separate, which is not vulnerable to time and space. That’s the spiritual work. That’s the journey of aging.”

I am so moved by reading Dass’s words again because they reflect my own deepest knowing that?we have a choice about how we age, and the stories we tell ourselves about aging, death, and dying will inform our process.

Cecelia Hurwich (aka Cec) a gerontologist colleague, mentor, and dear friend, whom I also interviewed for?Visionaries Have Wrinkles, was as luminous, vital, and full of life in her early hundreds into her eventual passing as she was when I first met her in her late seventies.

Hurwich has faced suffering and loss, having lost a great deal of sight and some hearing, too, and she lives with a heart that is weak. As Dass stresses,?the secret to Hurwich’s long, full life is to follow her passions where they lead her.?She surrounds herself with loved ones, and dear, dear admiring and loving friends of all ages.

When Cec and I visited last, she shared, “I’m ready to pass on because I’ve maxed out on love and lived such a rich, full life of blessings that I’d rather go now than later on.” Almost in the same breath she whispered that she was going to start her next book after she returned from traveling with her still-adoring partner of many, many years.

My choice is clear: I want to create my ending story much like Cec Hurwich’s.

What about you?

You might be surprised by what people usually regret in the last weeks of their lives, according to palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware, author of?The?Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing.

The top two regrets are unsurprising. The last three also make sense at a glance, but it is a little surprising to see them in the top five. Of all the possible regrets people have when looking back on their lives, these come up again and again as among the most important.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

The more I thought about this list, the more I realized something else interesting. Number three is actually at the root of all five regrets. So why is this such a common regret among the dying??Suppressing our feelings clearly has ripple effects in other aspects of our lives.?In the moment, holding back seems like a minor act that avoids the discomfort of confrontation or the possibility of rejection. The habit of holding back begins to define our relationships with others, as well as defining who we are.

When we hold back our feelings, we create a dishonest foundation for all relationships.?We might think we are keeping the peace, but holding back regularly has the opposite effect. Why? Because the feelings don’t go away just because we decide not to voice them. And even though we aren’t expressing them directly, we are expressing them, whether we like it or not—in our body language, our tone, our choice of words, and so forth. The other person picks up on something but can’t respond directly because we aren’t being direct.

The more we avoid telling the truth, or avoid expressing ourselves fully, the more distance we put into a relationship because the unexpressed is always there, building up. Intimacy becomes difficult, even impossible, because one or both people aren’t honest about how they feel or even who?they are. Furthermore, we don’t give ourselves a chance to resolve the situations that are causing these feelings, so we set ourselves up to feel this way often and with increasing intensity. Too often, this avoidance leads to bitterness and resentment.?The discomfort and rejection we seek to avoid?each time we hold back becomes an almost inevitable result of holding back.

This impulse, holding back to please others, is quite clearly tied to?the most common regret, living according to others’ expectations rather than our own. It is also a large part of regret four, not staying in touch with friends. The healthier our relationships with others, the more likely we are to see their value and to prioritize them in our lives. This value is important as we enter the time of life when we begin to lose more and more friends and family members.

Learning to express our feelings is also key to avoiding regrets two and five because it affects who we are in profound ways. After all,?if we don’t have the courage to be honest about our emotions, how likely are we to have the courage to take chances on our dreams??How likely are we to make necessary changes in our lives for our own happiness, including being honest (with ourselves, our colleagues, our bosses) about our work and what matters most to us??The habit of holding back our feelings becomes a habit of holding back. Period.

One caveat, of course, is to recognize that you don’t need to express how you feel about every little thing to every single person you encounter. The closer your relationship with someone (or the closer you want to be), the more you should share with that person. Even then, learning to prioritize what’s important to express and what isn’t, an ability I call?discernment, is essential to being honest without being cruel or self-centered.

Embracing your mortality is really about embracing?the truth of who you are and what you are capable of, no matter what your age or stage. You can’t make a difference in the world nor leave a legacy if you don’t?have the courage to see it—and tell it—like it is.?

Now is the time to face the fact of our mortality so we can glean the truths from it.?These truths guide our lives, now and into the future, so we can truly rock our age!