Category: Death / End of Life Matters

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Letting Go [Post 36]

A very hard skill to learn, perhaps the hardest practice or skill to acquire in life is the “art of letting go.” If one can truly learn to let go in life, one can live a better life, a good life, even a great, joyous and happy life. Not being able to acquire this skill can wreak havoc emotionally and psychologically and mentally for one’s entire existence.

I feel very fortunate that I have been blessed with this ability as as innate part of my psychological makeup, or so it seems. Of course I’ve been hurt, I’ve been through some really dark periods, perhaps abused and abandoned at times. I’m not denying deep hurts in my life. But, I have been able to, with time and personal inner work and occasionally assistance from others been able to heal my wounds and move forward. Healing and moving on has saved me much mental turmoil and allowed me to live a freer, fuller life. I’m so glad I am not a clinger, a hanger-on to both bad and good experiences. I feel one of the great teachings of Buddhism is to not have attachments, to not cling to desires.

Now, I know what I just said can be easily misunderstood and often is in our culture. Desires and attachments and clinging and greed are big things in our society. They are normal, most people would say. But, I say the more you can eliminate these habits, the better off you will be.

Lets take bad experiences. We all will have bad, hurtful, even tragic experiences in life. Just gonna happen. They can destroy us if we can’t move through them and find some way to heal from our wounds. Death is one of the hardest experiences to go through. No one can avoid the horrible feelings of losing a loved one in death. Well, except for the psychopath or sociopath personality. I’m talking about normal people.

Some people get stuck at that point. They have experienced the gut-wrenching experience of having a loved one die, gone completely and forever from this earth. We feel we’ll never get over the loss and some people never do. I’ve come to believe that may be true. In fact, I believe that it may be true that we never really “get over a death of a loved one,” but we can “get through” the loss and have a great deal of healing from the experience over time, often a long time. On the other hand, some people never recover from a tragic loss, they are permanently damaged. I saw that in my mother, when her father died when I was a little kid. She went off the deep end, as they say. She went mental and never recovered, just got progressively worse over the years until her death when I was twenty-five.

We all have to let go of loved ones, like our parents if we outlive them. Those times with my parents (above), gone forever.

I have experienced the death of loved ones and friends as difficult times. I have grieved. I have eventually gotten through the grieving and moved on in life, not forgetting the loss, but accepting it as part of life. I certainly don’t mean to minimize the depth of hurt or the sometimes long process of healing. What I’m saying is that I don’t get permanently stuck in a bad mental state.

Now, besides the death experience, there are lots of times during our lifetimes that we have to “let go” of things and experiences and periods and phases of our lives. I’ve had to let go of my first experience of having a life partner. It was a sick relationship as I see it. It was bad, psychologically and emotionally. It was very unhealthy, as I see it now. I have had to let go of friends that were not good for me in my life. Friends and acquaintances who were mean, nasty, crazy, unbalanced, etc. Haven’t most of us? Not always easy. Not pleasant, but such a relief once we have done it and healed from our “sin” (mistake) of picking the wrong people to have around us in our perhaps more “needy” times.

Loved my flying days. Fulfilled my dream, but those days are in the past.

I have had to let go of some loves and pleasures of my life. I relinquished my wonderful “hobby” of piloting airplanes, my childhood dream come true. I thoroughly enjoyed the many years of flying, but the time came when it was too expensive and I didn’t have the time to keep up with all I needed to do to keep my licenses current and active. Yes, I have friends that don’t understand how I could give up that great love in my life, but that’s okay, they don’t have to understand me. I just knew the time had come to “let it go .” I did what I had to do at that time in my life.

I had no problem retiring from my airline career. It was mostly a great experience, my thirty-three years as an airline employee. I had picked the right industry and field of work for me and really loved it. But after my time there, I easily let it go. I know some friends that have a very difficult time retiring, adjusting to a new lifestyle, but not me. I had my great time working and it was time to go, time to begin a new experience of being “retired.” Yes, it did take a time of adjustment in some ways, but my head was good with it all. I let it go!

Looking at a different aspect of letting go, I’ve also had to let go of some assumptions and dreams, expectations and promptings of society and friends that were not right for me, in all honesty. I had to give up the assumed role in society of becoming a “family man,” getting married (heterosexually, of course), and having children, you know, that whole experience. It was in my twenties that I realized that dream, that picture was not going to happen for me. That was not the path I would want to choose. I had to let go of that expectation. I had expected that after college graduation I would follow the plan and become a stereotypical family man with all the trimmings. There was a different path awaiting me.

The good times. Playing charades with friends. Temporarily gone but will return.

So, life is a lot about living true to yourself, enjoying the good times when they come along, not grasping to hang on to them (yes, the good times), and also experiencing the dark or bad times and also not grasping and holding on to them, also. The bad times, I feel, must be worked through, doing whatever work one must to get centered again in life, grieve, and move on. Always working to be emotionally healthy, balanced, authentic, joyous and happy, that’s the formula for living a good life, as I see it. Not resisting what reality is staring you in the face right now, this moment. Handle it, heal it, and move forward.

Now, as I write this, the world is going through a complete upending of everything, with the virus affecting the entire world. Talk about “letting go!” We are being forced to let go of so much, all at once, almost everything which we consider a normal part of life. Living freely, gathering in groups, socializing, going to events. traveling, going to restaurants, whatever. Everything we took to granted as just a part of everyday life. We have had to let go, period. Not much choice involved. Just mundane shopping now involves dressing up in protective gear and avoiding people.

That final “letting go,” letting go of life, everything we were, everything we dreamed, all our loves, at least on this earthly plane.

So, of course we will all have to experience that final, grand letting go of all time. The letting go of life on our death bed or wherever. Yes, I know in our culture we avoid all thought of this final release of all we are, all we have been, with no hope of anything more in this life, on this planet. All of life. Adios, farewell, and all of that. The big release, letting go. How do you feel about that? How have you handled that thought? Will you handle that thought with the time you have left? Personally, I have had two experiences in my life where I faced my death. I mentioned them in previous blogs. I have a feeling those experiences will resurface in my final hours or minutes in as vivid a way as they did previously, except this time I will know that “this is it, for real.” Perhaps there was a reason I had a dress rehearsal for this event many years ago.

To sum this all up, letting go is a good skill to have as we navigate through life. A difficult skill for most of us, an impossible skill for some of us. It will affect how we live our lives. It will affect our deep serenity and happiness and joy in life, I believe.

I believe in enjoying life, the good times, such as a helicopter tour of Kauai, Hawaii, above. But I say don’t cling , hold on the the good times in an unhealthy way , enjoy them and let them be fun memories.

Wally

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Death – The Big Taboo [ Post # 25 ]

With my cousin John

Yes, in our culture and society, they say death is the big taboo. It is not to be talked about, thought about, or in any real way dealt with. I see that when the subject comes up in conversations. People want to move on and avoid the subject. I see that and somewhat understand that, but I don’t think that is good, in the long run, as it’s a subject we all have to deal with many times in life, and ultimately when we reach the end of our life, which in many cases, we never know when that will be.

For some reason, death has always been a part of my life, sometimes staring me right in the face. I remember talking with someone a while back and they said, “you know, I’ve never really had to deal with death because nobody I’ve know in any close way has ever died.” Wow, I thought, that’s hard to believe. You’ve never really experienced death up close at all and you are in middle age.

The picture in this blog post is my first encounter with death, at a very early age. It is a picture of me ( on the left) and my cousin John playing together in our yard the day before he died. His family had brought him down to Los Angeles from Oregon for heart surgery and they were staying with us. I don’t remember much except that the next day after this picture was taken, his mother and my mother (sisters) were crying and wailing all day long, non-stop. It was a miserable day. I really didn’t understand what had happened. Maybe they explained it to me that he had died, but I didn’t really comprehend what that meant.

I remember when friends I knew in high school were killed in a car crash in our neighborhood. It was a shock, of course. The next major death was my mother’s when I was twenty-five. The day before she died she expressed her wish to me privately that she wanted to be buried in her family’s plot in Florida and did not my father to carry through with his plans to have her cremated and scattered at sea by the Neptune Society. Now, my father was very stubborn and did not want to do anything different than what he was planning on doing. I stood up to him and demanded he allow her to be buried in her family plot. Fortunately, I had just started working for an airline the year before and they provided free transportation for her body and us to Florida. I had a very strong will to carry out her final wishes, no matter what it took.

Thirteen years later my father died. During this time I also had several friends die. I never remember a long stretch of time where there were no funerals or memorial services to go to. Death, it seemed, was always occurring in my life.

An interesting event occurred when I was in college. One summer, instead of returning to California from Seattle (where I was attending college) for the summer, I was offered an opportunity to stay in Seattle and spend the summer living in a mortuary as a caretaker of the facility at night and to help out during the day with assisting the morticians doing their work. I was given an apartment in the mortuary, so I had an up-close view of the business and the bodies, being alone at night and opening the building for night visitations and wakes, etc. Once again, death staring me in the face, literally. It was an interesting time and I took pictures just so I would remember the experience later in life. The one lesson I learned from that experience was that there was no way I wanted to spend every day for the rest of my working life dealing with the death business. It would be too much to handle on a daily basis. Death, day in and day out. I did have an aunt and uncle that were very successful in owning a funeral home, but I guess I missed out on inheriting that gene .

I wrote a blog earlier about the large number of friends I worked with that died in the past several years and how I was experiencing “survivor’s” guilt about surviving all of them, many my age. From 2015 to 2018 I was going to funerals or memorial services at least once a month, and that is no exaggeration. So many friends are gone, people I worked closely with and were my age. It’s a weird feeling. I’m amazed I’m still here. I never really expected to live much beyond age forty or so. It was just a feeling I had most of my early life, probably because of my childhood depression, etc.

So, while I have not had the technical, well known type of “near death experience,” or NDE as it’s called, I have had two experiences of death in my life that have stayed with me and are very vivid today as they were the day I experienced them. The first one was around age six or so when I had my tonsils removed in surgery. I remember being wheeled into the operating room and the ether mask being placed over my face. When that was done, I experienced the weirdest feeling. It was pitch black, blacker than black, in a way. The ether was applied and I was told by the doctors to count backwards from 100. I felt I was going back to God. I can’t really describe the experience in words, but it is as real today as I think about it as it was sixty-five years ago. My thought at the time was, so this is what dying is like.

My second experience of death was in the 1970’s. It was a drug-induced state, I admit. I did not really experiment with drugs much at all, but for a short time I did. This night I had a very realistic experience of dying. Again, it is impossible to put this experience into words, but I was facing my death, a real experience of death. I knew this is what dying was like. This was a taste of the final life event, a very realistic full awareness type of experience. I was confronting what I had to confront, letting go of everything in life. Like I said, impossible to put into words.

So, what I’m saying is that I have not had the pleasure of avoiding death thoughts or being able to avoid the topic of death like some people have. For some reason I was destined to have to confront this subject my whole life. It’s always been right there before me in one way or another.

I was reading recently about how some people avoid dealing with death and others seem to just jump right in and think about it, converse about it. There are those that are called “death investigators,” they really study the subject and have a kind of fascination with it. Maybe that’s what I am, maybe not. All I know is that it is a fascinating mystery, as is all of life. I recall that when I was in college and had some free time, I would go up the hill from my dormitory and walk through the cemetery next to the campus. I would stroll through the grave sites in deep thought about things. I know, saying this sounds weird, but that’s what I did.

When I talk about these things I sometimes encounter harsh reactions from people. I’ve been told to not go to any more funerals or memorial services, do not go visit people in hospitals or any ill people, especially terminally ill people. Wow, talk about being in denial. That advise just does not resonate with me. That’s not how I choose to handle this subject. In fact, I have recently visited a couple of morticians and mortuary counselors to discuss end of life issues and planning. I have been writing down our final plans (for me and my spouse) and wishes while we have clear minds. That’s how I am handling this stuff. It’s not easy or fun, but there’s no way to avoid this final big project or event that’s going to happen. We do have to deal with life as it is and live in the mystery of it all.

Wally

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Survivor’s Guilt? Reconciliation with Death? [ Post #13]

We’ve heard about survivor’s guilt, you know, when someone survives an accident in which others were killed. That nagging, perhaps lifelong feeling of guilt of “why me?” Why did I live and all the others died? Yes, I should just be happy to be alive and count my blessings, there’s no reason to be racked with guilt for being so lucky. Except that life doesn’t work that way with our psyche. It can be a bothersome phenomenon, psychologically, mentally, and spiritually.

It took me some time to realize on some level that I was feeling the effects of survivor’s guilt, in a sense. Let me explain how this feeling has come about. It has a lot to do with my work life, my thirty-three years in the airline industry. You see, I worked with basically the same group of people all of those years. From age 25 on, the same people, perhaps a hundred or so co-workers, often in close quarters, day in and day out. We were just kids starting out in life, then young adults, then middle-aged and finally older adults hitting retirement age. I knew these people well. We grew up together, married, had families. All the life events that occur over the years. I think that is quite unusual in this world, to experience all this with the same group, like a large family.

Most people I know, outside of my work group, don’t stay in a job or single career or stay in a single company for their entire work life. Most people do not have the same co-workers at retirement age (60’s or so) that they had in their twenties. A very unique situation and work life.

So, in a sense, it was a very close-knit family of co-workers for several decades. Like I said, this is very unusual these days for most people. We really knew each other, we lived through so many life events together. And then, one by one, we started thinning our group through death. It seemed to be a continuous decimation of the ranks and it kept happening at a faster and faster pace as we aged. There was a period of a few years where I was going to funerals or memorial services at least once a month.

These were people my age or very close to my age. These were very lively, fun people in a close-knit work group. I began to think to myself, “wow,” I am really surrounded with a lot of death. When I would tell my other friends about this phenomenon I was experiencing, they could not relate to what I was going through. Their responses would be like, “gee, that’s weird, I experience a death of a friend or loved one every few years, maybe, but nothing like what you are experiencing.” It got to a point that most of my friends and co-workers were gone. I began to feel like the survivor of my work group. Then it hit me, this feeling I had was somewhat similar to the phenomenon of survivor’s guilt. Unconsciously I was thinking, why am I still here? All my friends are gone, many who I felt were a lot healthier and livelier than I.

So, I have a close relationship with the death experience. Even in college, I spent one summer living in and helping out in a mortuary. I would help the morticians during the day and I would be the caretaker of the mortuary all alone at night. (Don’t ask to see my pictures from those days. I’d even have friends come visit me at night and show them around and they would faint on me.) So, death has been no stranger to me.

So, this survivor’s guilt and my experiences have caused me to reflect on a lot on the end of life. Call me morbid if you must, but I see great value in not denying death but rather in reconciling myself to the inevitable. Do I have a fear of death? Most of the time, no, I don’t feel I do. On the other hand, yes, there are brief periods or terror regarding the end of it all (this earthly life). Fortunately, most of the time I’m okay with this birth, life, death thing. I am spiritual, but I also am human.

So, what’s the bottom line of all of this? Well, three years ago, my brother-in-law died in his sleep. It was the day before his seventy-eighth birthday. He had planned to go golfing with his wife (my sister) that morning and before going to bed he was saying how good he felt and how he was looking forward to the next day with great excitement. But the next day was not to be as he passed away early that morning as he slept.

That experience has really affected this whole “thinking of death” thing. Besides all my friends dying around me, this sudden death hit me hard. I realize that every day or every night could be it, my last day here. I’m very aware of this fact. I now really live every day as if it could be my last. I mean really, this is not just a trite saying for me. Every day I think, am I living this day as I would if I knew that this was my very last day on this earth?

So, I feel I’ve learned my lesson through all this experience with death. I have been blessed with a long life. A lot longer life than I expected in my early, very dark and depressed, pessimistic years. I love every minute of life. I do not get bored. I will not let the crap of this world knock me down any more. Like I’ve said in an earlier post,my personal religion is now very simple, “love, trust God, and *#$&/% the rest!” May we all find our peace with life and the life force, which I call “God.”

Wally

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Why I Love Funerals [Post #8]

Well, that title probably got your attention.  But there is truth in that statement.  Let me tell you why I love (good) funerals.  Now, I know funerals are very sad events.  At the last funeral I was at, the best friend of the deceased started his eulogy with the statement that “funerals suck!”  And that is true.  Of course funerals suck.  But there is a sense in which I love funerals.

At most funerals (and at memorial services) I get to hear the deceased’s life story.  I get to hear stories of their life that I would never hear otherwise.  It is my last chance, usually, to find out very interesting facts about the fascinating life they lived.  I happen to love people’s life stories.  After all, we never really know most of the people in our lives.  We know very little, usually, about our friends.

So I sit there and am amazed by what I learn as people share their experiences and knowledge of their dear, deceased loved one.  I am sad that it takes a funeral to learn about my friends, to really know who they were.  As I see it, by then it is too late to appreciate their life and let them know.  I guess it’s better than never knowing the stories, I just wish they had shared more of their real selves while they were alive.

Which brings me to today, and me and my writing, blogging, and speaking.  Several years ago, while visiting my nephew in Florida, he handed me a book.  The book was my father’s memoirs, an autobiography.  My father apparently typed out these pages of his life story a long time ago, but nobody knew of this until my nephew found them among boxes of family “stuff” after my father’s passing.

My nephew had these pages printed up in a book and gave a copy to family members.  What a surprise!  I never knew much about my father and reading the book filled in a lot of the gaps in my knowledge of him and gave me an appreciation of what he lived through.  And that got me thinking, Maybe I should do something like that, get my stories out there, out of my head and into the world, or at least out there for my friends to know.  I thought about it, realizing, yes, we don’t know people and their life stories until their funerals, and then we don’t know very much, usually.

The problem is, writing your memoirs or autobiography can be a daunting project.  I was interested, excited and committed, but it is too easy to procrastinate to just write the long story of one’s life.  I realized I might never get very far with the project.  That’s when the thought of internet blogging came to me.  I realized I am not a “techy” type person and probably couldn’t handle writing a blog, but doing some research I discovered even people not computer savvy could do it with a little help that was available.  So, I plunged in, and here we are. I realized that besides my life stories, there are other subjects I could write about.  I have lots of ideas, so there is always something to write that might be of some interest to someone.

I have a little public speaking/preaching  background, having been to seminary.  I enjoyed that and I got some good reviews.  But that takes a lot of work in preparation, plus I have to seek speaking opportunities (sell myself, etc.), and then the audience is usually rather small, and who is going to remember anything I said a few days later.  I find it easier to sit down and write and when I do, there is a written record to come back to if I or someone else chooses to.

So, that was the genesis of my blogging project.  I like having good conversations with people.  I like really learning about people. I want to know about people before they die.  I say, let’s be more open with our lives, that’s my wish and desire.  We get too hung up on the unimportant things in life.

Wally