A month ago, I reached my 96th birthday, and I was surprised how interested I was in how much longer I have to live. For the last few years, I have been obsessed with preparing for death. I want my passage out of time to be smooth and comfortable for everybody concerned, especially for me.
When the covid pandemic struck five years ago, I even wrote a book about dying called “Entering Eternity With Ease.” I really wanted to name it “Dying Joyfully”, but that title was already taken by the Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu in their book on the subject. Deep down, I was really so scared of the passage from life to whatever comes after life, that the book was an attempt to convince myself that dying wasn’t so scary.
Then, two years ago, one of my best friends, Joe Matthews, suddenly, silently, softly passed away acquajogging in his pool. I had spent ten years playing golf and lunching with him every Friday, and we often talked about our anxiety over dying. While I was writing “Entering Eternity”, I brought a copy of “Me and Kuhbler Ross” the longest Chapter in the book, about the 5 stages of dying that are featured at most “Trivial Pursuits” contests. I know I won one with it. Joe must have made the pilgrimage from Denial of Death to Acceptance of Death, because he left us without a whisper or a whimper, without an “I love ya,” or even a “Bye, bye.”
I wrote a blog article on “Wouldn’t You like to go like Joe ?”, surely wishing we all had the good fortune to just “pass away” so easily: Entering Eternity With Ease, indeed. But I would also like to say Goodbye and tell my loved ones how much I really loved them. I want them to understand how much I really appreciate every little item in their relationship with me. I want them to taste the joy we shared together, even including the pains that were inevitable, even the hurts that were avoidable. I need to thank them for everything.
But how can I do this before I die? I have in front of me on the wall, the pictures of at least a hundred people whom I dearly love, and hundreds more, both alive and dead, whom I have known these 96 years. They are relatives, schoolmates, teachers, colleagues, clients, patients, neighbors, friends, and many, many others it is impossible to mention.
How do I do justice to all the people I have known and loved in my life? To all the people who have known and loved me? It would take me a year to write to or call up just the closest ones. And most of the rest would be too hard to reach. There has to be a way, and it has to be somehow through the Holy Spirit. It has to be beyond this moment, this place, this person. It is endless, boundless, eternal.
Most of the people I loved have already passed away, so how can I tell them how much I loved them? This is where I begin to wonder about eternal love. We have to live forever because we will never be able to say how much we love each other. That is what eternity is for.
Back in the 70’s there was a novel followed by a movie, called “Love Story”. The famous line was “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”. I’d like to say instead, “Love means never having to say goodbye.” After almost a century of contemplation, I suspect that something as important as love has got to take forever. When I was a little kid, a Jewish immigrant, Irving Berlin, sang “I’ll be loving you, always, not for just an hour, not for just a day, not for just a year, but always.” I had no idea then what eternity was. I still don’t. But then, in High School English, I read Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” and recognized what I had already deeply sensed, that I was going to live forever.
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;…….
From God, who is our home.”
Once we accept that death is not the end but the beginning, or rather the continuation of our life which we have had, in God, from all eternity, then we are relieved of the anxiety to settle our lifetime loves right now before we die. Right now, we must rest in peace in our own hearts, in our own minds, in our own souls. To rest in Peace is to rest in God. I know we say at funerals, “May they rest in peace”, about the dead, and that is good. But I am talking about us the living, especially those of us who approach death. May we rest in Peace, like the Hebrew ‘Shalom’, like the Arabic, ‘Salaam’. They all mean the same: may we rest in God, ‘In whom we live, and move, and have our being’ according to St. Paul.
To rest in God, is to surrender our helplessness and our hopelessness to God who is Love Eternal. To rest in God is to accept that we exist, as Paul Tillich says, ‘in the Ground of Being’ which is Love Eternal. After all, St. John says God is love, and therefore Love is God. And we come from God, and we remain in God, world without end Amen. And all of us are in the same Ground of Love forever. So believe that Love is never having to say Goodbye.
I close this with T.S. Elliott’s words from “Four Quartets”:
“We die with the dying:
“See, they depart, and we go with them.
“We are born with the dead:
“See, they return, and bring us with them.
“Here is where you are and nowhere never and always where
“time has been redeemed and all shall be well and all manner of
“things shall be well. May it be so, Amen.”
Sal Umana 