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A Boomer Ponders Death

Next month I will turn sixty. Sixty means more of my life has passed than is still to come. Barring any unforeseen anomalies, and with the exception of retirement sometime in the future, the next major transition in my life will be death.

Next month I will turn sixty.

Sixty means more of my life has passed than is still to come. Barring any unforeseen anomalies, and with the exception of retirement sometime in the future, the next major transition in my life will be death.

Death is a great blank wall impenetrable to the physical senses. Death means the loss of a person’s presence in the dimension of life known to sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste.

There are many accounts of so-called “near-death” experiences. But “near-death” is not death. Death is the permanent disappearance of physical presence from this time-bound material realm. When I die, you will no longer see me. You will not hear the sound of my voice, or feel the touch of my hand. To all surface appearances, I will be simply gone.

The great ancient Hebrew poet wrote:

As for mortals, their days are like grass;
   they flourish like a flower of the field;
for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
   and its place knows it no more. (Psalm 103:15,16)

I have been present with a number of people at the moment the “wind” of death has passed over their lives. I have watched them gradually fade until that last breath when they were suddenly “gone”.

At first, after the heart stops, there appears to be no immediate difference. The dead person does not move. His chest no longer rises and falls with the familiar rhythm of breath that has animated this person through physical life.

The deceased still bears the familiar look he had in life. But, there is an absence in death that has replaced the presence that animated this body in life. Something is gone.

I am not alone in approaching the venerable age of sixty. The Canadian population is aging as we baby boomers hit our senior years. For an increasing number of us death is no longer a remote reality, consigned to a distant future that need be of no concern. When we look in the mirror, we see mortality written in the wrinkles on our faces.  In the newspaper we read our friends’ names in the obituaries. We are becoming increasingly familiar with end of life observances.

The questions of death press in upon those of us who are willing to look at the inevitability of our approaching demise.

How will I die? How will it feel? Will it hurt? Will I be alone? What happens after I die?

Of course no one can answer these questions. Death stands as a stern reminder of the limits of our capacity to know the future.

But, there are two questions in the face of death that it is useful to ask before we find ourselves lying alone in a bed taking our last breath.

How is my life today preparing me for the death that inevitably approaches? Am I learning to live more gently and lightly in this life so that when the final letting go imposes itself upon me, I am more likely to make that transition with grace and surrender?

I am going to spend a lot more time dead than I have spent alive. No one knows what happens after death.  But, if the “something” that is suddenly gone at the moment of physical death, is not nothing, then, while I still have the chance, I may want to consider how I am nurturing that invisible “something” that my body has carried through these past sixty years of my life.

Christopher Page is the rector of St. Philip Anglican Church in Oak Bay, and the Archdeacon of Tolmie in the Anglican Diocese of B.C. He writes regularly on his blog  www.inaspaciousplace.wordpress.com