Celebrating Death (Or at Least I'm Trying)
It’s very hard to find your way back to joy when someone close to you dies and it’s not a “good” death. When elderly members of my family have died, we have celebrated a good life and a timely death, and that can be uplifting, as well as grief inducing, in certain ways. But a member of my extended family died yesterday, primarily, it seems, because of a broken heart and a loss of the will to live. A long-term relationship ended at about the same time that he was laid off from his job. He was a man who lived to work and to care for others, and both of his “missions” were taken from him at the same time. Although he was healthy and relatively young (mid 70s), he went downhill fast, starting with extreme depression, then shortness of breath, malnutrition, and dehydration. His close family tried hard to intervene - but we all know the expression about leading horses to water. I think that finally he was ready to go, exhausted from days in the hospital and every possible effort to sa