Dying

This moment always has me wondering what it’s like, though I’ll find out soon enough for myself. Alone, it’s always and only alone, there’s no other way. Though I suppose it could be like Rushdie’s plane explosion in The Satanic Verses, two men floating down and talking together.

After tests and heart catheterization on Wednesday, October 20, 2010 cardiologists told us my heart issues were inoperable and gave me two to five months to live. My thought while still in hospital that evening was exactly as above -- what’s it like, what will it be like, it happens to each one of us and there’s no way around it, what’s it like? As a priest I’ve been through dying many times with other people and always wondered what it was like. Now I’m about to find out for myself, I’ll keep a journal to log the experience and observe myself, have myself as my own object. My journal was started that evening. Within a day or so, at a friend’s pressing, it became my daily CaringBridge posting, then, upon leaving Cleveland, my +Time blog. It’s now well past time to give it up except that it’s my equivalent of Linda’s crossword puzzles, a mind activator and enlivener. 

Now three-quarters of the way through, 2012 has been for me a particular year of wondering. What goes through our mind when we know we are dying? In my case three months of my two-to-five months went by, October 20 to January 24, waiting for my surgery appointment, during the latter part of which it was day to day, as I said yesterday, pill-to-pill. There were things to hope to do one more time but not worry about if it didn’t happen, because it was beyond my control. Thanksgiving, to which everyone came with the same certainty that I had. A walk with Linda to show her exactly where to scatter. Those two movies, Narnia and Potter! Christmas. One more walk through Cove School, the Bill Lloyd Building. Still another two-pill walk down front to My Laughing Place to be under my cedar tree and by the Bay at sunset, and two pills back, don’t let Linda know! The experience with every friend and loved one (except Linda who had no choice but to listen) that nobody was willing to talk about it; and after all, it’s uncomfortable to talk with a dying person about a future in which you know you’ll be there and the dying person will not. The realization and prayer every single morning, “Hey! I woke up again today! Thank you, God!” Then get up immediately so as not to waste one second of life. 

But that wasn’t quite it; what I wondered about was the actual moment of dying: what would that be like? Would it be like simply not waking up from surgery that was a total no-dreams blackout, fading into oblivion? Would I move through that tunnel into the light? If so, what then? Mindful of C.S. Lewis and The Great Divorce, would it be like getting off the bus? Would the bus arrive at dawn, as in Lewis' story, or at sunset? Who would meet me? Mom? In Lewis' story, a couple of -- spirits -- are met by someone they hadn’t cared for in this life. There was an obnoxious boy in high school whom I rather detested; he played trombone in the Bay High Band and we’d fought in one of the practice rooms one day, and to finish it off, when I got him down I’d grabbed a flower pot and dumped the contents, flower, dirt and all, in his face, surely he’d not be waiting for me when I got off the overnight bus to Heaven. Could happen.

It didn’t happen for me then, because friends and loved ones and surgeons gave me +Time. So, I’m still wondering.

My wondering all came flooding back tonight when my retired Navy commander buddy Paul called a few minutes after midnight:

Bobbie Hunt 

October 1936 - September 2012 

What was it like, Bobbie? What’s it like? Go with God and the Saints in Light.

Tom