When I was a child, the first funeral I attended was my grandfather’s. I remember being a little nervous. Not over the event, since I had no clue what to expect, but I was filled with sheer curiosity as we crossed the threshold of the church in a sanctuary filled with the scents of warm musk clinging to the usher’s suit and passing hints of floral perfumes trailing the church mothers. I was still a child. Young enough not to fear death itself, yet old enough to feel its weight without language to hold it. I knew, in the simplest sense, that my grandfather was gone and that we wouldn’t be seeing him again any time soon. For the first time, I felt the emptiness of what this change creates in the gut, and the unsettling questions it raises in the heart about existing.
Why are we here? What was it all for? Is this truly the full arc of being human? These are the kinds of questions grief can introduce for some, and without warning. In an attempt to reduce the vastness of the void, many of us reach for what we can hold onto. Keepsakes. Stories. Memories carefully preserved and placed on the indestructible altars of mind and heart, where those we love live on…at least for as long as we do. Sometimes this is comforting. Other times, it can be a reminder of wounds we wish had healed. Our relationships to life’s final transition are deeply personal. However, the one thing that unites us, is a seemingly instinctual need for integration—a way of making meaning, or at least making peace, with what irrevocably changes us. Whatever that integration means for us, it is the way we develop a sense (whether welcome or strained) to sit with reality more peacefully.
In the last few years I have spent accompanying people at the end of their lives, I have learned many things. And perhaps surprisingly, most of them have very little to do with death at all. I learned that in the most crucial moments when questions far surpass answers, leaning to the instinct of compassion and love can be the balm to soothe even the most wounded heart. Sacred Life Care Initiative believes that every client and family deserves that compassion and it fuels our devotion for this work. I have learned that it is the tears of those at the bedside that flow deep rivers. The heaviness weighs upon those who must stand again and exit the threshold of that sanctuary where I once had my first encounter with “loss.”
As the living weep, the dying speak with astonishing clarity within the silent environment of peace and wonder that they command without words. They say: “Love now!” “Be here now!” and do so fearlessly, without reservation. They remind us that listening intently matters, and that shared silence can be a form of communion. As the rat race loses its urgency we regain consciousness that who we are, is already enough.
We typically hold life’s ending with reverence. Yet the courage to engage that devotion among the living is equally divine. Life, in all its fragility, is exquisite, worth cherishing, and worth meeting fully, again and again, with every sunrise. This is the wisdom of dying.
