A reflection about dying

I don’t find myself particularly afraid of death these days, though I do hope I have the courage and strength to face what sometimes must be an extremely painful and terrifying process preceeding it.

I worry less these days about whether my life has some meaning beyond the day-by-day activities most of which, by any stretch of my imagination, do not seem to have any long-term effect for anybody including myself.  Eating and walking and thinking and music and sunshine and worry and all the things that make up my ordinary life seem to me to be self-validating.

But what I really hope about death is that it’s not all over when I die.  Life is so exciting, there seems so infinitely much to experience, to do, to know, to explore, so many fascinating people and life forms that I want to know so much better.  I don’t even mind giving up my own personal consciousness and sense of self if somehow I can be part of a larger life.

People in general don’t seem to live with an orientation to death, and I don’t think this is pure Freudian denial. Even people who know they are dying and can talk about it openly often don’t feel that they are moving toward nothingness.  I think it’s because death isn’t a move into total annihilation, a return to the handful of molecules of which our bodies are made. 

I think that I, and everyone else, is a part of something far more profound and transcendent than our allotted number of years on this planet. 

Addendums about osteoporosis

A number of people mostly interested in alternatives to the standard bi-phosphate treatments like Fosamax have touched base with my postings on osteoporsis.  I am happy at this point with the regime of diet, supplements, and exercise I’ve worked out for myself, but there are few things I’d like to add to what I’ve already said.

• First, not everybody’s osteoporsis is caused by the same thing.  So what works for one person might not be the solution for everybody.
• Nor is everybody’s osteoporisis exactly the same.  I’ve heard the term applied to very mild loss of bone density without any qualifications or explanations.  And it doesn’t necessarily strike in all the bones in the body equally.  The spine is the most dangerous, because a fracture there is the most painful, the most debilitating, and often the most difficult to heal.  I’ve reached the conclusion that bone density isn’t even necessarily the problem, and that bone flexibility is much more significant, which is why Oriental women typically have less bone density but also fewer fractures than western women in the developed world.
• Not everybody wants to take the same kinds of risks.  Every approach has some risk involved, whether it be the accepted medical treatment or changes in life style, or some mix. For myself, I don’t usually choose the “natural” as opposed to the “medical” approach.  I would chose surgery in relation to cancer, for instance, not coffee enemas or mega doses of vitamin C.  But for my osteoporosis in particular, I think a life style change is my best bet.  It isn’t necessarily for everybody.
• Not everybody wants or is able to maintain the discipline involved in the life-style changes required to adopt a non-medical approach to osteoporosis.  If I were a doctor, I would consider whether my patient was apt to follow a regime requiring her to take calcium and other supplements three times a day, to change her diet perhaps drastically, and to exercise 20-30 minutes every day.  Some patients don’t even want to be offered this alternative but prefer to take medication, and leave the decisions to their doctor.
• For myself, I see my doctor as my consultant who gives me the information I need to make an informed decision, not someone who takes that responsibility for me.  However, my doctor is not an expert on osteoporosis, and largely accepts the research results suggesting that bi-phosphates increase bone density and so solve the problem.  I am not a medical doctor, but I do have a Ph.D. and can understand research reports.  So I have read a lot to learn what I want to know, and I’ve simply reached a different conclusion than most – but not all - doctors today. 
• The best medical source I can recommend is http://www.marilynglenville.com/osteoporosis.htm, a website maintained by a Ph.D. woman nutritionist in England.   It presents a balanced overview of the causes and possible treatments for osteoporosis that can be understood by the general public.  I also find Glenville’s book Osteoporosis: the silent epidemic an excellent guide.  I read it through once, and keep it handy to reread various sections as they become relevant.
• Lastly, I find keeping up the discipline day after day after most days to return my bones to a healthier state takes effort.  I am grateful to all of you who read this blog, and/or add your own thoughts, questions, and challenges. 

I hope it helps you as much as it does me.

 

Returned and refreshed

We are just back from an island on the French Atlantic coast where we were recuperating from our dark English winter.  Despite the occasional rain, we managed a long walk on the dunes or in the forest fringing the beaches every day, which worked its magic.

Oleron today attracts tourists, but the marks – and scars – of its history are evident.  Napoleonic forts dot the coast both onshore and offshore.  We stumbled on a huge Napoleonic edifice hidden in the coastal woods that had bars on all the windows and doors and was eerily unmarked except for a tattered sign warning “private:  no entrance.”  Our first thought was that it was an alternative Guantanamo, but there were no guards, and the people living on the island could not – or would not – tell us anything about it.

Although the island is developed now, I was struck by how much history was evident not only in the buildings but in the people themselves.  The faces of those old enough to have lived through the two World Wars there were stamped with the mark of stubborn survival.  Most of the older people were as much as a foot shorter on average than the next generation, due almost certainly not to genetics but to nutritional deficits. 

I remember seeing the same thing in Javea, the small elegant fishing village where we lived in Spain for ten years.  The older women, all widows, relentlessly wore black, and they had that same look as the older people still living in Oleron.  Spaniards were living with the legacy not so much of the world wars as of their own civil war between the Fascists and Communists.  In the town center the market hall faced the church.  Both were pocked marked with bullet holes, the legacy of the two opposing factions shooting at each other.  On the third side, a town house was perpetually shuddered and locked in remembrance of the family who had been marched from there to the high cliff outside of town and given the option of jumping into the sea below or being shot.  Either way, their bodies were washed up on the coast wherever the waters finally left them.

As outsiders, we lived there for years not knowing why the locals avoided that cliff with its stunning outlook.  Or that the mansion up there had belonged to Franco, which was why it was being steadily vandalized.  Or why the Guardia showed up each summer stationed outside the summer home of the man we learned had been Franco’s doctor.

I was going to say that Oleron is rather like a cross between Cape Cod and Myrtle Beach with their fishing shacks and restaurants and long sandy beaches.  But Cape Cod and Myrtle Beach weren’t in the wars. 

Not like Oleron.

Respite

This is my last posting until next month when I hope to return – older if not wiser. 

A quick PS and a small retraction

At least half a dozen people have responded privately to my saying in a post last week that, after my visit to Maryknoll, I would never give another homily.  Consequently, I have been unable to let my comment go without re-thinking it.  First, it was perhaps a rather self-centered thing to say, based as it was on the view that people were seeing me as a source of spiritual direction as I stood up there during the liturgy.  So my horror at being perceived as a preacher (instead of a teacher) was at the very least a little Over The Top. 

And I must confess that I myself learned more about hope in the process of preparing this homily, or self-reflection.  And it seems that other people did too.  One person came close to reprimanding me for not accepting the gifts that I have and the obligation to use them. 

So I take it back.  I think it unlikely that another situation will arise in my lifetime when I will actually be asked to give a reflection during a liturgy.   But if I were, I would do my best to do so.  I think I might even look forward to the unlikely opportunity, and approach it with a little less self-importance.

In any case, the whole Maryknoll visit was a significant learning experience for me, which I enjoyed way beyond the bounds of most run-of-the-mill enjoyments.

Worse or just awful?

I’m trying to decide if the Burmese government’s response to the cyclone in Burma – or Myanmar as they prefer – makes even Bush look good.  

 

Abraham Lincoln and Barak Obama

I read an article this morning pointing out some similarities between Lincoln & Obama I found somewhat surprising.  Both were/are

• lawyers
• from Illinois
• seeking the presidency at a relatively young age (51 and 46)

Both Lincoln and Obama were/are

• relative newcomers to Washington with no more than four years experience in Congress, but with significant experience in Illinois politics
• dogged by accusations of extremism and charges of associations with potentially violent radicals
• opposed a war launched on dubious grounds – Lincoln against Polk’s war against Mexico based on unfounded accusations of provocation;  Obama against Bush’s war against Iraq based on false claims of WMD’s
• challenged by the question of race in America which each addressed in a major speech before their party had nominated its presidential candidate

 The biggest question of all is whether they both were/will be:

• elected President of the United States of America
• be remembered among the great presidents

 

 

 

In opposition

I’ve just emptied my email trash box filled with panting assurances that “bigger is better.”  This and “younger is more beautiful,” are among the modern advertisements I find most annoying.

I’ve only recently developed an annoyance with the association of young with beautiful.  It is no such thing.  Just today in the supermarket I saw a stunning grey-haired woman probably in her seventies, and the most attractive airline stewardess on American flight I took last week was at least in her mid-fifties.  And look around.  It’s not hard to find young people who are not beautiful by any standard.

However, the “Bigger is Better” mantra is the deeper of my annoyances, probably because I’ve been getting over it for longer.  I was named after St. Therese, the Little Flower, which annoyed me as soon as I was old enough to understand the import of it.  I had no desire or intention to be little anything, and thought at the very least, my parents could have had the foresight to name be after Teresa of Avila who was adviser to Popes and Kings.  By middle age, though, I’d begun to get an inkling that bigger was possibly overdone.  Great people were not always so great, nor, as I wandered through grave yards and cast my eyes upon famous effigies, did greatness really seem to have a long half-life.  Then I began to read about quantum mechanics, where little and big, top and bottom, existing and nonexistent, before and after, are muddled completely. 

It gradually dawned on me that Bigger is perhaps antithetical to the constrains of human-ness.  Needing to be immensely important, terribly powerful, overwhelmingly effective, or hugely influential as I was conceiving them for myself are pretty much beyond the potential of human limitations of time and space.  We cannot hope, or be expected, to do more than fill that small modicum of time and space given to us in one life time.  And so I find great contentment today in being immensely unimportant, ineffective, and of very little influence.  And big, whether it is in political ambition or sexual prowess, holds no allure for me or for anyone whom I love.

Which is probably why I found the story in Maryknoll Sister Jean Pruitt’s brochure about the home she founded in Tanzania for street children so wonderful.  The story is about an old woman who walked each day along the beach as the ocean tide receded to return stranded star fish to the sea.  A young man laughed at her saying there were hundreds of star fish and she couldn’t possibly make a difference.  “It makes a difference to this one,” she said, as she returned another to the water.

(www.dogodogocentre.org). 

But still…

Have you ever noticed just when you think everything is going swimmingly, that’s when your computer decides that it doesn’t want to work anymore?  Mine has been grouchy all day, and it might be contagious.  At least it has not left me in the best of spirits.

But still, commentators are saying that, after yesterday’s primary results and whatever she says, Hilary Clinton is not going to capture the Democratic nomination.  I cannot begin to describe the jolt of electricity that will zap around the world if Obama is elected President of the United States.  I would dance the night through – even if I am too old to believe that it is the beginning of the Second Coming.

Hope at the cash machine

When I was in New York City last week, I stopped to withdraw cash from a machine in the Bronx.  I withdrew the cash from the slot, pushed the icon saying I did not need a receipt, and walked away.  I was about to leave when a middle-aged Black woman said to me with the kind of authority that is possessed only by self-assured matriarchs, “You just left without signing out from your bank account.”  She grabbed my arm and marched me back to the ATM, telling me that what I did was extremely dangerous.

I’m not used to being spoken to as if I were in the first stages of senile dementia, but I have to admit this was a super-stupid thing for me to do, and I was both chastened and grateful.  I did as I was told, and then submitted to a further stern lecture about what the screen should look like before I step away from it in the future.

This is the kind of experience that gives me hope for mankind.  It’s not the kind of thing people do that ever makes the news.  And yet it happens.  It would not have been hard to understand if this woman had seen what I had done and taken advantage of making a further dip into my account.  After all, she could have reasoned, look at all the unjust things that have been done to her.  This is a chance to get just a little even.  But she didn’t.  Instead, she gave me a much needed talking to.

It’s the kind of thing that just might save the world after all. 

And I do not say that facetiously.