A number of years ago when I was working with psychotherapist
Devers Branden, she put me through her "deathbed" exercise.
I was asked to clearly imagine myself lying on my own deathbed, and to
fully realize the feelings connected with dying and saying good-bye.
Then she asked me to mentally invite the people in my life who were
important to me to visit my bedside, one at a time. As I visualized each
friend and relative coming in to visit me, I had to speak to them out
loud. I had to say to them what I wanted them to know as I was dying.
As I spoke to each person, I could feel my voice breaking. Somehow I
couldn't help breaking down. My eyes were filled with tears. I
experienced such a sense of loss. It was not my own life I was
mourning; it was the love I was losing. To be more exact, it was a
communication of love that had never been there.
During this difficult exercise, I really got to see how much I'd left out of
my life. How many wonderful feelings I had about my children, for
example, that I'd never explicitly expressed.
At the end of the exercise, I was an emotional mess. I had rarely cried
that hard in my life. But when those emotions cleared, a wonderful
thing happened. I was clear. I knew what was really important, and who
really mattered to me. I understood for the first time what George
Patton meant when he said, "Death can be more exciting than life."
From that day on I vowed not to leave anything to chance. I made up
my mind never to leave anything unsaid. I wanted to live as if I might
die any moment. The entire experience altered the way I've related to
people ever since. And the great point of the exercise wasn't lost on me:
We don't have to wait until we're actually near death to receive these
benefits of being mortal. We can create the experience anytime we
want.
A few years later when my mother lay dying in a hospital in Tucson, I
rushed to her side to hold her hand and repeat to her all the love and
gratitude I felt for who she had been for me. When she finally died, my
grieving was very intense, but very short. In a matter of days I felt that
everything great about my mother had entered into me and would live
there as a loving spirit forever.
A year and a half before my father's death, I began to send him letters
and poems about his contribution to my life. He lived his last months
and died in the grip of chronic illness, so communicating and getting
through to him in person wasn't always easy. But I always felt good that
he had those letters and poems to read. Once he called me after I'd sent
him a Father's Day poem, and he said, "Hey, I guess I wasn't such a bad
father after all."
Poet William Blake warned us about keeping our thoughts locked up
until we die. "When thought is closed
in caves," he wrote, "then love will show its roots in deepest hell."
Pretending you aren't going to die is detrimental to your enjoyment of
life. It is detrimental in the same way that it would be detrimental for a
basketball player to pretend there was no end to the game he was
playing. That player would reduce his intensity, adopt a lazy playing
style, and, of course, end up not having any fun at all. Without an end,
there is no game. Without being conscious of death, you can't be fully
aware of the gift of life.
Yet many of us (including myself) keep pretending that our life's game
will have no end. We keep planning to do great things some day when
we feel like it. We assign our goals and dreams to that imaginary island
in the sea that Denis Waitley calls "Someday Isle." We find ourselves
saying, "Someday I'll do this," and "Someday I'll do that."
Confronting our own death doesn't have to wait until we run out of life.
In fact, being able to vividly imagine our last hours on our deathbed
creates a paradoxical sensation: the feeling of being born all over
again the first step to fearless self-motivation. "People living deeply,"
wrote poet and diarist Anaïs Nin, "have no fear of death."
And as Bob Dylan has sung, "He who is not busy being born is busy
Dying."
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