Journey home: a path with heart

Living with an open-hearted acceptance of death is a path to reclaim a richness we’re denied in our death-phobic culture.

Death trails our lives as surely as night follows day, but many of us still feel shocked when the news comes that we or a loved one has a life-ending ailment. Suddenly, life is shorter than we’d anticipated — its certain course suddenly truncated, pared back to something less than our imaginings.

First comes the body blow. Then the shock and awe. Life’s truth delivered: I will die. Someone I love or care for will die. For real. Then, more feelings will flood in. Maybe anger or fear, and in time, some version of sadness or grief will settle in for the death-ride.

These feelings are the residue of a deep-seated notion in our culture that death is something that befalls others, not me, not mine — or not now, at least.

Often, the next visceral impulse is to ask ourselves, what can we do to avoid a death sentence? It’s a question as old as humanity, reflected in our myths and religions that are awash with tales of immortality.

The lesser cousin to our dreams of immortality is this: maybe we can cheat death. Not forever, but for a little longer perhaps. Maybe we can put off death by extending the human lifespan beyond its natural limits.

Since the middle of the last century, the use of drugs, technologies and surgical wonders has seen people with terminal illnesses live for months, sometimes years, longer than people in similar circumstances just a few generations ago.

Faced with a choice between certain death and the promise of more time, or a miracle cure, few of us can resist the yearning to live. But the possibility of more time held out by modern medicine is a fantasy of a life merely interrupted by a few extra visits to the doctor and a few more pills each day. [i]

Many people with life-ending diseases hope or imagine that life-extending therapies will give them more time to live the life that didn’t seem so pressing or important until now. But the experience of many who choose death-defying medical interventions isn’t what they’d imagined.

While the impact of forestalling death is unpredictable for an individual, a growing body of evidence shows many people reap a terrible bounty when they choose interventions aimed at granting them more time.

The evidence shows that they endure more illness, more complications, more depression and less autonomy than people who choose palliative and hospice care.

They’re also more likely to die in an intensive care ward of a hospital, tethered to tubes and machines, in a place with little privacy that imposes a regimen of incessant disruption.

The surgeon and author Atul Gawande said, ‘When there is no way of knowing exactly how long our skeins will run … our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register.’ [ii]

Western culture tends to view death as a fearful and traumatic event — something to be thwarted at any cost. But in our efforts to outflank mortality we seem to be losing sight of what dying asks of us, and what we might gain as individuals and as a society.

Embracing mortality might be our opportunity to pursue and celebrate the preciousness of life; to live fully in the time we have remaining; and to review and complete the unfinished business we’ve accrued and deferred for too long.

But that’s not all. Living with an open-hearted acceptance of death, whether our time is near or far, could be a way to craft a life-affirming legacy for our families and loved ones that’s nearly unimaginable in today’s world. It could also be a path to reclaim a richness we’ve been denied in our death-phobic culture.

Journey Home is a set of essays about living and dying with an open heart that offers a provocation — that the way we live and die could rekindle a long-forgotten memory that embodies what is timeless and deathless.

Our children and all who remember us will feed at the table we’ve set. Given this, we have an opportunity to nourish ourselves and everyone we touch by cultivating a willing embrace of the cycle of life and death.

Dan Gaffney is a teacher and author. His book and podcast series, ‘Journey Home — Essays on Living and Dying’ was published in 2019.

[i] Jenkinson, S (2014) Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, p35

[ii] Gawande, A (2014). Being Mortal — Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End, Profile Books, p173