Gentling death

We fear the unknown, so it is no wonder that we fear death, that it's presence makes us distinctly uneasy.  Recently, death has been nudging into my life, through friends and relations who are, or have been, terminally ill; so I spent some time getting gentle about what death means for those who are left behind.

We fear the unknown because we have known so little about death, but that is changing.  From esoteric wisdom to near death experiences, a clear, consistent understanding is emerging.

We came from love, we return to love.  The life force that animates us is not lost, nor can it be, for energy cannot be destroyed, it simply changes form.  Even the personality goes on, though it is absorbed into loving embrace of the soul to rest, to recharge and to renew itself.

Death, or even the discovery of a terminal illness, splits us in two.  It is as though we live two lives simultaneously.  On the surface, it may appear that we are coping; inside we are falling apart, or even numb. We walk down the street and wonder how everyone else is managing to live life normally, when the fabric of our lives, the fabric of our very being, has been irreperably torn apart.  Life will never be the same again.  We will never be the same again. 

It is an illusion that we are independent.  It is only when we lose a loved one that we realise we were never independent.  We are entwined in each other.  The spiritual truth that All is One can seem so very abstract, but when we lose a loved one, we glimpse the truth of it.  They are a part of the fabric of who we are and, as such, they go on being a part of our fabric, woven into the character of who we are, assimilated and living on within us.


And we are left behind.  We stay on, trying to pick up the pieces and act as before, in a world that seems somehow unreal, unaware of our titanic loss.  Yet spiritual traditions say that death is the greatest gift we give those we leave behind because, in being torn open, we can learn much. 

We glimpse the truth that All is One; we understand the value of loving and being loved, how nothing else matters as much as that, in the final analysis; and, in our broken hearts, we learn compassion, for everyone has been touched by the loss of a loved one.  All is One.

In our fear and distrust of death, we have made it somehow brutal and barbaric.  We meet people who have lost a beloved, and we turn away, or ignore the greatest truth of their lives in that moment because we lack the skills to express our compassion. We have tried to hide it on the fringes of life, pretending that it doesn't exist.  It is time for a rethink.  It is time to gentle death.  

It is a right of passage, the greatest second only to our birth (and look at how that is embraced).  The pain it leaves behind shows only that the joy in our birth was justified, we loved and we were loved.